Happy to be a beach boy in Biarritz – or St Ouen

So did you hear of any Jersey fast-car drivers getting pre-emptively breathalysed and warned off by the gloriously named PAF – the Police des Airs et des Frontières – when they disembarked at St Malo’s gare maritime this summer? (I always think their acronym is just crying out for at least one exclamation mark: PAF!)

One law-abiding friend was read the riot act and he felt a bit miffed by the military brusqueness of it all, but then France’s agents de la force publique have never gone in for any of your friendly bobby business. No, ‘the fear of the gendarme’ has always been the essence of policing here.

Mind you, Temps Passé, there may have been the odd exception if this Londoner’s recent letter to the Times is to be believed: Sir, Your item on change to children’s passports brings to mind an episode from the 1950s, when both my infant children were included in my own passport. I had agreed to drive a lady friend of my wife to Paris. On our arrival in Calais, an official inspected our two passports with different names, and asked where the children were. “At home with their mother,” I replied. He gave us a broad smile and waved us on with the salutation “Vive le sport!”

Vive le sport!, indeed, but Mme Masstairmann and I have never bought into the French definition of marital fidelity, which is one spouse and hardly any lovers. Well, not unless there’s something she’s not telling me, anyway. No, sport for us at this time of the year means the beach, swimming and above all body-boarding, if the sky and sea give us an even break, no pun intended.

But the surf’s rarely up to much on our local, north-facing ‘spot’ at Longchamps, just to the east of Dinard golf club. And when it is half-way decent, whole swarms of riders jockey for a place on each wave and you have to keep a constant eye out for fallers and flying boards. So in the summer holidays, we generally head for the Atlantic coast down near Biarritz, or for our favourite beach, St Ouen.

And although things are slowly changing, surfing here still tends to be a young man’s game apart from the odd, very odd pioneering girlfriend. So Mme Masstairmann’s always amazed and delighted to see even silver-haired grannies trotting off down the beach at Le Braye or El Tico with their wooden belly-boards tucked under their arms.

Mind you, someone was telling me that you can’t get those boards anymore, they’re dodo-stickered, so maybe I should donate the two I’ve still got out in the garage somewhere to Jersey Museum, eh. Mme M’s not so sure, though, because we do still use them, every third winter or so, for snowboarding down the hurtling flanks of the castle in Léhon village, just south of Dinan.

And anyway, what’s this I read on the JEP website about whole squads of Jersey kids today not even knowing how to swim? Good Lord, when I arrived at Hautlieu in 1963, any pupil who couldn’t splutter and splash a length in the school pool had to go to Mr Lakeman’s Nig-Nogs’ Club for lessons for as long as it took to get himself up the bath in one go and without swallowing half of it on the way.

As the name suggests, this was very much in the days pre-PC when public humiliation was just one of the arms in any boys’ school’s disciplinary arsenal. Any lad who’d forgotten his cossie for PE just had to swim nude, naked and starkers, blushing brightly while the rest of us fell about laughing. But all that had to stop, of course, when the gorgeous, green-uniformed girls from Rouge Bouillon shimmered up the hill and we went co-ed.

So, before they were even out of nappies, we took our own two girls, Morgane and Fleur, to the baby swimmers’ club at St Servan’s Piscine du Naye, right next to the gare maritime in St Malo, and the place I now use (ahem) as an emergency car-park when the one at the gare is full, but that’s just between you and me, okay?

The advantage, and danger, of their early ‘baptism’ was that they grew up seriously unafraid of water, so we had to be constantly on the look-out whenever there was any around until they learned how to swim. I still shudder when I think of the quiet Ploof! I heard one day while sun-bathing on a poolside and rolled over to see toddler Fleur half-way to the bottom of the deep end.

But the nanny state is about to strike here, too, and one pool down near Rennes has been told to close their club because the chlorine in the air might just be dangerous for some tot’s lungs. Only ‘might’, mind you, and only for the one kid in a zillion who’s particularly fragile or allergic but that’s enough these days with the threat of being sued hanging over every town hall’s head.

The club president complained that they hadn’t had one single problem in 30 years, for goodness sake, and if we listened to every whistle-blower we wouldn’t even dare to get up in the morning. But he seems to be forgetting that of all the people who die in France every year, 99% do so in a bed, so maybe the health authorities ought to think about banning them, too, eh?

Nationwide last summer, there were 1,238 drowning incidents in France, resulting in 497 deaths. Most of the incidents took place in the sea but most of the deaths occurred in fresh water, with little children in back-garden pools being particularly at risk.

Three-quarters of the fatalities involved men over 45, though – swimmers, nauti-sporters, yachtsmen or watersiders who fell in – succumbing to exhaustion, currents, illness, epilepsy, cardiac arrest, or ‘hydrocution’, the thermal shock suffered by someone who’s too hot jumping straight into cold water without splashing themselves down a bit first. Then there’s alcohol, which was behind 100 incidents and 54 deaths.

And all this in a country that came third only to the USA and China in the final medal table at this August’s world swimming championships in Barcelona. Our neighbours Belgium did ever so well, too. Yes, not one of their entrants drowned this time, though, in fairness, I should perhaps point out that the French tell Belgian jokes rather than Irish ones.

But this Parisian tourist must be regretting stripping off and jumping into the port at Perros-Guirec, an hour west of St Malo, to save this yachtsman who’d fallen in. Because when he finally climbed back up the quayside ladder, he discovered that some kind soul had pinched his wallet.

Then there was the English visitor who refused to leave the water when the red flag was run up. Now this means not only that swimming is dangerous but also that it’s forbidden, and he hadn’t realised that the ‘CRS’ on the life-guards’ t-shirts stands for Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité, the riot police transferred to the coast while the cities slumber in the summer heat. So they yanked him out and booked him for ‘rébellion à la justice’: refusing to obey a police officer.

Oh! And if you smoke, mind where you light up if you stop off for a quick dip in St Malo because the Cité Corsaire has just followed Cannes and Nice by creating a no-smoking zone on its beach. The aim, says the new by-law, is ‘to de-normalise the act of smoking’ and offenders face an 18-euro fine. And if a big, brusque, burly bloke wearing a t-shirt marked CRS did happen to order you to put your ciggie out …

Kenavo!