Thank heaven – my fishy times are all in the past!

They still insist on it every year, despite their now being on the wrong side of 20. In fact, the only difference this time was the glinting, glittering hoar frost on everything, even the dancing daffs, and the sub-zero temperature which meant that their search was distinctly nippier than ever before, in every sense of the word.

Oh well, at least we didn’t have to worry about the chocolate melting in the spring sunshine, eh!

Then it was April Fool’s Day, which was sheer bliss for me this year. Yes! I arrived in France in 1980 to teach English as a foreign language, thus finding myself condemned to bridge the awful gap between my pupils and ‘Angleesh’, and one day a year every year wondering if I hadn’t got any paper fish sellotaped to my back.

Because that’s what French kids do to mark the annual open season for practical jokers. And they find it doubly hysterical if they can ‘get’ Le Professeur, too, whole classfuls of them doubling up in silent, finger-pointing glee in Monsieur’s or Madame’s wake as their victim sails unwittingly down the corridor, fish shimmering in the breeze.

As an added twist, they sometimes tell you discreetly that you’ve been ‘got’, when in fact you haven’t, then savour the contortions as you struggle to locate and remove the thing.

But I didn’t get ‘got’ this year, because I had handed in my board-duster at Christmas, you see. Yes, retired!

Nobody really knows when or why the fish-sticking tradition all started, though, but one theory (well, Wikipedia’s, anyway) suggests that fishing used to be banned from 1 April to let the fish breed undisturbed, so anglers in withdrawal were given a kipper in mocking consolation.

Then they started furtively hooking a real fish to people’s clothes – clothes which were heavier and more ample a century or two ago, so they didn’t always notice straight away. Well, not until things started to hum a bit, anyway, and that wasn’t only the flies, either.

The best-publicised stunt this year was the makers of France’s much-loved Carambar toffee sticks announcing on 21 March that the cracker-standard jokes inside their wrappers were to be replaced by educational quizzes. The nation was initially rocked by the news, but soon rose as one to cry Haro! Haro! In fact, the pressure on the company became so intense that they finally thought it wiser to shout ‘April Fool!’ a couple of days early, before the cobblestones started to fly.

I thought my daughter Fleur was having a seasonal joke on me, too, when she said that a song called ‘Jersey’, would you believe by a group called Granville, was currently top of ‘le hit parade’, so I checked it out and blow me if it wasn’t true. So why don’t you have a look, too, at http://www.lesinrocks.com/inrocks.tv/granville-le-clip-a-la-gondry-de-jersey/

Then there was the highly unlikely story about this old Breton lady who fell seriously ill and was cured only by a transfusion of her daughter-in-law’s, well, excrement. I did wonder whether that wasn’t some kind of April Fool joke article, too, and one in surprisingly poor taste as well, our Ouest-France being a family paper, like your favourite evening daily.

Except that it was all perfectly serious, and I’m sorry if you’re reading this over dinner, tea or supper or whatever you call it your house, but then I gagged over breakfast myself, for goodness sake.

Yes, 86-year-old Lucie Le Puil had just about given up all hope of ever getting well again because Clostridium difficile, a potentially lethal bacteria, had infected her digestive tract and intestines and was slowly destroying them, despite the doctors’ best efforts and several courses of antibiotics.

She had already lost her voice and 14 kilos when the specialist suggested a transfusion of, well, clean faecal matter, an experimental technique they are starting to explore in America, apparently, but which is still extremely rare over here.

Anyway, it was her last chance and her daughter-in-law Joëlle volunteered to be the donor, so the, um, fresh stuff was inserted. Without anaesthetic. Via a tube. Through her nose. No, no, keep still, please – you’re doing ever so well and it’ll soon be over now. And it worked, too!

The new, healthy bacteria not only got rid of C difficile, they’re also stopping it coming back. Lucie left hospital only a week later and will soon be pottering around her garden again.

Just down the road in Rennes, 64-year-old Marie-Claire probably saved her husband René’s life with a donation, too. He had been on dialysis for years, waiting for a kidney transplant along with 12,000 others here, when it was realised that she could be a compatible donor.

But first it was off to court because, legally speaking, removing organs is a bodily mutilation, even if it’s voluntary, and you have to get judicial approval for it.

Then they both went under the scalpel ‘sur le billard’ (on the billiard table, as Gallic gallows humour calls it). Madame is now 400 gm lighter, Monsieur 400 gm heavier, and it’s all a case of so far, so good.

Dr House has finally breathed his last, though, after eight very successful seasons, and I’m not sure Mme Masstairmann has quite got over it yet, if she ever will. Martin Winckler is a big fan, too, as well as being a well-known doctor himself here and also an author who has just published ‘Dr House, the Spirit of Shaman’.

It’s an autopsy on the series and he says that House must have been good to survive the mauling it got from French TV. Not content with some indifferent dubbing, they also smoothed out all the subtle little rough edges and often showed the episodes in the wrong order. Then they censored ‘inappropriate’ bits and cut some scenes completely, when they didn’t leave out entire shows.

The TV company said that their policy of airing two or three programmes one after the other on the same night meant that the ones going out in prime-time, pre-watershed, had to be toned down a bit to suit a younger audience. But Winckler says, Humph! France is the only country in the world that does that, for goodness sake.

We also thought we had seen the end of compulsory breathalisers in every car, too, but they are back on the agenda again. Yes, you may remember the government first making them obligatory in March last year, but saying that the gendarmerie would only slap our hands till the autumn if we didn’t have one in our glove boxes yet.

Then it transpired that many of them were dangerously unreliable anyway and could lead you to thinking you were fit to drive when in fact you weren’t, or vice-versa. So the government decided to forget the whole thing.

But that was obviously a disaster for the factories who had started to turn them out in their millions, and one firm down near Montpellier had to sack 200 of their 300 staff.

So the ministers performed a U-turn yet again, sort of, and breathalisers are now highly recommended, but not compulsory, and there aren’t any penalties for not having one. No, no, don’t try to understand – that’s the way things usually work in France. Unless it was all just a ‘poisson d’avril’, an April Fish or Fool joke, of course. What do you think?

Kenavo!