IT IS not really too much of an exaggeration to say that not much happens in our sleepy little hamlet of La Lauressie, and if you make that a Sunday afternoon, there is absolutely and completely nothing happening.

So it was, with some surprise, that the tranquillity of our inactivity was broken by the buzzer ringing on our gate, our electric gate, no less. I know it isn’t very Peter Mayle and authentically rural to have an electric gate, but it makes me feel like a Russian oligarch when I drive through it, and if I can’t have a bullet-proof Merc, a steamy mistress, and a billion dollar bank balance, I can at least have the gate.

It turned out not to be a lost rambler, or somebody asking when the next sponsored cud-chewing event was going to take place, it was in fact a small boy. This was not a mischievous boy, but one in something of a panic who wanted me to follow him, so I took off down the hill after him, still wearing my slippers. I followed him down to the uninhabited house just below us. In the four years that we have been here we have never seen the owner because he has been resident in the local retirement home for some years. Apparently his relatives do pop down to the house from time to time to cut things back and stop the house falling into dereliction. The boy’s mother was just one such relative and had made herself useful by cutting back some of the undergrowth and having a little bonfire to get rid of it.

Unfortunately, as these things tend to do, the little bonfire had become a big bonfire and set fire to the rest of the undergrowth. It was threatening to turn La Lauressie into a Californian-style firestorm inferno. I grabbed a plank of wood and waded into the flames in order to try to beat them out. At this point my footwear began to show obvious flaws of the nylon and slippery variety, so I decided to run back up to the house for decent footwear and a hose.

On returning with the hose and a shovel I discovered that the tap connector was the wrong size and that the damsel in distress had put a call through to the local pompiers (fire brigade). Rather than just watch things get out of control, I decided to do what I could and started to beat out the flames. By the time the siren had gone off and the volunteer firemen arrived in their shiny new engine, I had unfortunately put out all of the flames and there was nothing left but a bit of smouldering grass.

I have never seen a bunch of shiny-helmeted men look quite so disappointed. They had emptied the toybox, put the boots on and everything, and there was no fire. I was almost tempted to fetch a box of matches and start another one just to give them something to do. Undaunted, they unrolled their hose and got the two newest recruits to douse the spot where once there had been some flames. And then the second engine arrived, then a fire van, and then the big monster four-wheel-drive fire truck. He could have just driven down the track but he had to cut the corner and off-road it, because he could.

By this point we had 15 firemen milling around the place wondering where they could put their ladders, or who to administer first aid to, not to mention the Gendarmes who appeared from nowhere. There was also a small crowd of onlookers gathering, with Sue at the forefront, ogling the nice young men in their uniforms, especially when the two new recruits got hosed down at the end as part of their baptême de feu (baptism of fire) like something out of a slightly rubbish Take That video. So we went from nothing happening to everything and then back to nothing again in less than an hour, and I have had to hide the matches from Sue in case she starts getting ideas of breaking the boredom by calling out those chrome-helmeted young men with their fit bodies. Give me the quiet life any day.