We are not amusant

Peter Mayle's classic Toujours Provence was once translated into French - the title being lightly corrected to Provence Toujours, funnily enough. It has been read there with distant curiosity. But there has been still no Toujours Cambridgeshire, or Une Année en Essex.

There is just no appetite at all in France for books raving about life in Lincolnshire or Leicestershire, to mirror our avidity for books banging on about the joys of relocating to the Lot or Languedoc - no yearning romances of life among our spacious fields of sugarbeet and potatoes, quaffing our delectable Tennant's Extra and feasting on such tasty local specialities as lasagne and chips, while lazing in the refreshing drizzle, relishing integration into village life, with its colourful cast of roguish burglars, muggers, and twoccers.

Some of the more sensitive among us appear to have been feeling this lack of reciprocity rather sharply - taking it as a bit of a snub even. And if the French won't oblige, we'll do it ourselves. Such is evidently the reasoning behind a recent publication, A Year in Muswell Hill (Central Publishing, £9.99), ostensibly by "Pierre LaPoste", a French food-andwine critic who has been sent by his paper to N10.

Pierre finds his initial explorations of British cuisine and sexuality offputting, but by the end, he has decided he likes it here after all and will in future divide his time between Muswell Hill and Menerbes - having fallen for a part-English, part-French lady, Geneviève Tomlinson, who seduces him with these irresistible words: "Bonjour, Matelot, voulez vous coucher avec moi?"

In fact, we can exclusively reveal that this book - selling well at the Muswell Hill Bookshop and reported elsewhere as a genuine view from the Continent - is a spoof, entirely home-grown. Pierre LaPoste, il n'existe pas. He is the creation of the man who claims to be the writer's agent, one Richard Sharples. "My lips are sealed," Sharples says, gamely. "I can't possibly be the author, my French is minimal." Oh yes, he can. Pierre LaPoste's French doesn't feature too big either (and anyway "Geneviève Tomlinson" is credited as the translator).

So there we are. Jilted again, still waiting for the French to appreciate us as we deserve. But perhaps instead of feeling miffed, we should be relieved. Because, actually, the book that A Year in Muswell Hill pretends to be was written for us more than a century ago. It still makes painful reading.

Hippolyte Taine, the great French historian and philosopher, made long visits to England in the 1850s and 1860s and published his impressions of the country as Notes sur l'Angleterre in 1871. Taine was no enemy of England. As a positivist, he admired its stable political constitution and the subordination of religion to secular concerns.

He found even some aesthetic charms here, notably our parks and gardens. But - remote as the England of the 1860s is from us - all too many of his observations remain pertinently offensive.

Unlike Pierre LaPoste, Taine didn't fancy English women much. "English women are less agreeable," he says. "An Englishwoman does not dress to please her husband, does not know how to make herself attractive and has not the gift of being coquette and piquante in the privacy of her own home."

He was particularly put off by their gnashers. "As for their long, outjutting teeth, one cannot get used to them. Are they a cause, or an effect of their carnivorous diet?" When it came to the cuisine, Taine judged it to be - "except in the very best clubs and among continentalized English people" - "devoid of savour".