Murmansk or the galettes of St Malo?

They sailed in from Rotterdam on 20 November and unloaded their cargo of sunflowers, but the maritime inspectorate won’t let them sail off into the sunset again until they’ve carried out some essential maintenance first.

The captain has been on to the ship’s owners every day since, but they still haven’t coughed up the cost of the repairs. Nor have the men been paid for the last two months. Then Irina Mouret, an expat compatriot who lives just down the Rennes road in St Suliac on the banks of the Rance, heard of their plight and she soon sorted out a chain of solidarity.

Two winter soup kitchen and food parcel charities, La Banque Alimentaire and the Restos du Coeur that I talked about last month, are making sure that the men are properly fed and watered, and the Secours Catholique lent them some bikes so that they could get out and about. Mind you, I’d have thought it’d be a bit nippy for that. But then again, I’m not from Murmansk, am I?

Locals have been popping aboard every day just to say ‘bonjour’, and a Cité Corsaire granny cooked them a fine old Breton feed of galettes and crêpes, savoury then sweet, 20 pancakes washed down with the local scrumpy. Passing fishing boats slip them the odd mackerel, too.

Then the town hall treated them to the traditional French dinner on Christmas Eve, but they missed all the music and the people celebrating in the streets the way they do back home. New Year’s Day was spent on board with another festive meal and champagne – and doubtless the odd drop of vodka. Na zdorovye! That’s Russian for ‘cheers!’, so you can’t say you don’t learn anything in your favourite evening paper.

Yes, they’ve been overwhelmed by all the hospitality, but they can’t help feeling more and more like castaways and wondering how long it will take their families to scrape together the roubles to get them home again.

CHRISTMAS came early for us Dinan Mastermen, and from an unlikely source. Yes, King Sarko I, our omnipresident, announced that because the world’s climate and France’s car manufacturers were all looking decidedly peaky, the government would give 1,000 euros to anyone who scrapped their ten-year-old car and bought a new and more eco-friendly model.

Renault, desperate to clear their stock, were also offering a 2,500 euro reduction on top of that, so Lucette, our 20-year-old daughter Morgane’s 25-year-old Peugeot, was chugged up to the garage and on to the back of the scrap wagon. Er, just pass Morgy another Kleenex, would you?

Not that old Luce was a rust-ridden banger. Readers with elephantine memories or yet to get themselves a life might remember that we bought her for 500 euros off Mme Masstairmann’s ageing Auntie Mimi about a year ago – and although she’s 25, she’d only done 3,000 miles or so on her once-weekly pootle down the road to Landivisiau market. Never been higher than second gear, either, Mimi added with a blush. Slept indoors all her life, too.

When I mentioned to the nice young sales lady that our other car was also a Renault, she beamed and purred. Oh, good! So we’ll be getting 100 per cent penetration, shall we? But Mme M fired me a frosty glance and I coughed to cover my chuckle. I know which side my baguette’s buttered.

Mind you, Sarko’s 1,000 euros is peanuts compared to the present he gave his zillionaire businessman friend Martin Bouygues, owner of TF1, France’s leading independent TV channel. Yes, he’s just ruled that there will be no more commercials on state channels from 5 January. So guess who’s just cornered the market for mainstream TV advertising. And it’s merci who?

It looked like a nice little dead cert earner, too, until they realised that the big three channels had always broadcast their main evening news bulletin from 8 to 8.30, followed by interminable ads and the weather until 8.55 and then the top-of-the-bill film, variety or game show or whatever.

But the state channels’ main-draw programmes now start at 8.30, and TF1 is haemorrhaging viewers and advertising income on what had traditionally been their juiciest slot. So to tilt the playing field back their way again, the president is thinking of ordering the state channels to devote that time to some improving documentary on, say, the EU’s pig slurry legislation or unsubtitled extracts from Serbo-Croatian opera.

And to cap it all, Sarko has just announced that from now on he’ll be the one who personally appoints the head of state TV and not the relatively independent Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel. Of course, the choice will be perfectly impartial, as you’d expect from the man who had the editor of Paris Match sacked after a cover story he didn’t like; who didn’t bat an eyelid when the editor of the left-wing Libération newspaper was handcuffed in his office and then led away and strip-searched in police custody after one critical article; who’s been furiously trying to muzzle Plantu, the front-page, satirical cartoonist in Le Monde; and who, unhappy with his reception at a regional TV station during the presidential campaign, promised all the staff that ‘once I get in, you’re all out!’

I COULD go on and on, and Mme M would say I often do, but she still won’t tell me who was behind the final Christmas present under our tree. It didn’t have a label, either, so La Patronne said that I might as well open it as she, Morgane and Fleur, our other daughter, turned away and seemed to stifle a giggle.

The wrapping fell away to reveal ‘The Official Handbook of Grumpy Old Men’ – ‘as seen on TV’.

I’ve never heard of them myself, have you? But my initial hurt slowly changed to relief and then euphoria as I first flicked through and then devoured its pages, and realised that I am not alone in the world after all. All together now: ‘Tis the season to be grumpy, tra, la, la, la, la …’

Yes, on Christmas morn, it rang more bells than Quasimodo. Not that I am a grumps, of course. Well, OK, only a bit. And anyway, as Bob Geldof says on the cover, if you aren’t grumpy, that means you’re content with the world, and who the expletive deleted could be that? And another thing . . . I also got this book called ‘Attention All Shipping’ – a journey round the shipping forecast.

Its author, Charlie Connelly, says that Finisterre was replaced by Fitzroy in 2002. How could you let that happen? And why didn’t anybody tell me, for goodness sake? All right, so maybe Fitzroy did only invent the whole caboodle way back in the mid-19th century, but, I mean, come on. Sole, Biscay, Fitzroy, Trafalgar – it just doesn’t sound right, does it?

And don’t tell Mme M whatever you do because she comes from the Finistère too – finis la terre, land’s end, as you follow the sun – but the one on the westernmost tip of Brittany. But the icing on the cake was the JWP flopping down on to the doormat with the news that never again will you, I, we be picking ‘n’ mixing in Woolies in King Street, and I didn’t even know it was up for a dodo sticker, me. Honestly, you turn your back for five minutes . . .

Ah, well, never mind. Here’s wishing you a very Bonne Année 2009 all the same. Or ‘bloavez mad!’, as the Bretons say. But then they would, wouldn’t they? Yes, Na zdorovye!

Kenavo!