All names here have to be approved, so if you wanted a boy named Sue, forget it

Not that it could happen in France. No, all names have to be declared and approved at the town hall within three days of birth and it’s nigh on impossible to change them after that. And you used to have to choose one on an official list, too, which is why older French people are all called Pierre or Marie, or Jean-Pierre or Anne-Marie for those who wanted to zing things up a bit.

The authorities are a bit more tolerant now and you might even spot the odd Johnny (Hallyday) but the question the Registry Office jobsworths still ask themselves hasn’t changed: will the name be an unfair burden for the child to bear? So if you were thinking of something along the lines of Johnny Cash’s A Boy Named Sue, or the entire team that won the cup, you can forget it.

Then there was the famous case about ten years ago of the parents who wanted to call their daughter Megane. Nothing much wrong with that, you might feel, except that their surname was Renault and the two together are also a best-selling car. The family had to fight for more than two years before the court of appeal finally said, oh alright, go on then, but on your own heads be it.

One name that did slip past their guard at Dinan town hall, though, was Odile Le Croc, bearing in mind that the French tend to give their surname first when asked to identify themselves. Even Breton names like Yannick or Morgane have only been officially tolerated for the last 30 or 40 years or so and even then you might still run into stiff resistance elsewhere in the country.

Yes, we had some southern friends in Dinan who finally moved back down to Montpellier and wanted to call their new son Ewen. But that was initially refused because no one down on the Mediterranean had ever heard of it and the functionaries only relented when we sent them written proof of its existence.

Choosing handles that work on both sides of the Channel for our two girls wasn’t easy, either. Mme M fancied the popular ‘Marine’ and I rather liked ‘France’ in grateful recognition of everything this country has given me since we first set foot on each other in 1980. But the ladies in the case, proud Bretons all, still shudder and shake their heads even now when they think of it. So we finally went for Morgane, the spirit of the sea, and Fleur, which is very unusual here, funnily enough, The Forsyte Saga having sunk with all hands when it tried to cross the Channel.

And it’s almost impossible to change an iffy surname, too. We once knew someone called Mme Soulard, a ‘soulard’ being a drunk(ard), and just to make matters worse, she was also head of the local Alcohol Advisory Centre, for goodness’ sake. But when she asked her solicitor what she could do about it, she was told that the procedure was long, complicated and costly and almost always ended in tears, anyway.

Actually, when I got the French nationality I needed to sit the teaching exams here, the judge hearing my application did ask me if I wanted to Gallicize or Frenchify ‘Masterman’. People with awkward or unpronounceable foreign names often did, she said, and it was now or never.

But even though the natives do call me Breeyann Masstairmann and even though we Mastermen were the inevitable target of jibes like Mastermind when were kids – and I still am from my pupils now – I decided me and my moniker could rub along together for a little bit longer yet.

Not that the French are very good at names, anyway. If you’re a regular reader of these letters – and if not, why not, eh? – you may remember that I’ve already mentioned that when, for instance, they built the world’s fastest, sleekest passenger train, an engineering masterpiece, they decided to call it the ‘train à grande vitesse’ – the high speed train – which really grips and stirs, doesn’t it? And after much debate, their magnificent new national stadium was christened, cue the fanfare, the . . . Stade de France.

Well, now they’ve been and gone and done it again. Yes, a silver-haired commission of senators was looking for a new name for France’s worldwide network of national arts centres. The Germans have got their Goethe Institutes, the Italians their Dante Alighieri Societies, the Spanish Cervantes and the Chinese Confucius, which are all instantly and distinctly evocative.

So what about taking advantage of the planetary renown of Victor Hugo, Voltaire, or Molière, say? Or one of the Impressionists, or even Sartre, for goodness’ sake? Mais non, mon vi’. Their 144 ‘centres culturels’ and their 154 ‘services de coopération et d’action culturelles’ will now be known as the Institut Français. I just don’t understand it.

Pierre Poirier (65), a retired hospital worker and former children’s court magistrate, couldn’t understand what was happening either the other day. He’d been summoned to a police station in southern Brittany at 9.30 am without being told why.

When he got there, the duty officer simply told him he was being placed in custody and he was given a Full Monty body search and put into a cold, dirty cell. Then they took his fingerprints, mug-shots and a DNA sample for the national criminal records data bank. A solicitor arrived an hour later, but he didn’t know what it was all about, either, because all advocates are allowed to do in the first instance is check that the arrest procedures have been respected.

At 11.15, Pierre was finally told that a 15-year old girl had come to his house selling raffle tickets one evening last November. Yes! Last November! But she ran away when she saw Pierre through the frosted-glass of his front door, apparently half naked.

Obviously, he didn’t remember the evening in question but they wanted to know if he often left the bathroom wearing only a T-shirt after taking a shower, and all sorts of other things about his sex life, too. The girl didn’t recognise him in a video identity parade but they still detained him and his wife was also brought in for questioning. He was just dreading a night on the wooden platform bed in the cell that he’d now have to share with six other detainees when, at 5.45, he was told he could go.

There would be no charges after all but he was given a stern reminder that ‘exhibition sexuelle’ has been an offence since 1810 and even consenting adults making love behind a locked door were prima facie guilty of it if they were still visible through the keyhole. Okay, the law was dusted down in 1994 but Article 222-32 of the Code Pénal still states that the indecent exposure has to be deliberate . . . or negligent. Seems like a good each-way bet for a conviction, doesn’t it?

So you will be careful the next time you step out of your shower over here, won’t you, because the curtain-twitchers over the road or Google’s Street View will be the least of your worries. Yes, you’ll be, um, exposing yourself to similar treatment and maybe even a year over the wall or a 15,000 euro fine, or all three. But unlike Belcher’s Lord Jesus Christ, you’d probably only make the inside pages of the local press, I’m afraid, and even then only as ‘un(e) touriste jersiais(e)’, the names nearly always being altered or omitted to spare the guilty.

Kenavo!