Ground Floor: The man and I drove through France recently, but our purchasing power was too late to be responsible for the hike in consumer spending which saw French economic growth register its biggest quarterly jump in five years.
The growth numbers released at the end of last week were one of the few to take the markets by surprise lately - only a couple of days earlier the newspapers had been gloomily predicting falls due to higher oil prices and the appreciation of the euro. As it turned out, growth, at 1.1 per cent for the quarter, was significantly higher than that predicted by the state agency, Insée.
Finance minister Thierry Breton was ecstatic, saying the numbers were "exceptional". Perhaps, but I imagine he's hoping they are not just a one-off and that they're pointing the way to a brighter future for the euro zone's second-biggest economy.
As part of "old Europe", France has struggled over the past five years. Meanwhile, the leaner, meaner economies of newer Europe (including ourselves) have seen productivity rise and have neatly sidestepped some of the more ponderous work practices that have bedevilled the French.
Earlier this year, the public rebelled at the prospect of a change in labour laws which would have allowed employers to fire workers under the age of 25 in their first two years of employment. The government made an abrupt U-turn in the face of the protests, even though its proposals barely scratched the surface of an employment environment which was hardly satisfactory in the first place. But with unemployment at more than 10 per cent, it seemed as if the attitude of the French was that if you were in a job you should do everything in your power to hang onto it.
Yet not being able to hire and fire easily is a barrier to setting up a business in the first place, consequently meaning that unemployment is probably higher than it needs to be. It's not as though there aren't plenty of opportunities to do business in France, it's just that the bureaucratic minefield often makes it far too much trouble.
Last year, despite opposition, the National Assembly passed a Bill which allowed employers to offer extra hours for more pay to their employees - thus all but ending the revered 35-hour week introduced by Lionel Jospin in January 2000.
The original aim of this law was to create employment on the basis that if you could only work so many hours a week, your employer would then have to take on more staff. It singularly failed in that objective and, because it was based on an annual number of hours, it also meant that many people worked up their 35 hours in four days and took long weekends or more holidays. Great if you had a job, not so good if you didn't.
Making a massive generalisation, the French are not workaholics. They like their time off, usually clocking up at least five weeks' holidays during the year and pretty much disappearing for July and August (which is why our being in France won't have as much of an impact as it might have in terms of consumer spending - many shops were actually "fermée pour les vacances", and that was in Biarritz, a holiday destination).
The 35-hour week wasn't all about employment, though. It was also supposed to give people a better work-life balance and this is something that can't be a bad thing. The whole idea of "presentee-ism", being at your place of work simply to be seen to be there, drives me demented. It's not productive but nobody wants to admit it.
Presentee-ism is about showing you're a committed member of the workforce who should be promoted over less visible colleagues.
They work hard on Brittany Ferries, though, which is how we travelled from Cork to Roscoff and back, and where the workforce in the French-owned company seem to be predominately French themselves. Brittany Ferries plies the Plymouth-Santander route too.
Last year I freaked out when I discovered that despite the fact that two out of the three countries it sailed to were in the euro zone, the prices were all displayed in sterling. I couldn't help wondering whether it was because everything looked cheaper in pounds.
This year, the goods in the shop were priced in sterling, as were the headline prices in the self-service restaurant. But in the waiter-service restaurant there was dual pricing and in the cocktail bar everything was in euro. I'm still trying to figure out the rationale - was someone supposed to change everything to euro at some point but they went on holiday and didn't bother? Or are they showing a lack of confidence in the euro, despite the fact that it's been around longer than the 35-hour week?
There is one thing that the French are really good at 24/7 and that's their road network. Maybe it's because they like to get out of the cities in a hurry that even the minor roads are always in good repair.
We did 650km in seven hours, mainly on motorways and only getting stuck in traffic once. It took 4½ hours to cover the 285km trip from Cork to Dublin. We might still be ahead of the French in economic performance, but when it comes to getting from point A to point B they have us licked.
• I've been inundated with requests from people wanting to know how to make their mobiles ring for longer - I didn't realise that it was such an issue. I've put the information on my website, but for those of you who don't want to mess with it yourselves, your service provider can do it.
