Miles Kington: France works itself into a fièvre over silly games of Brits

Every time I go to France on hols I learn a new phrase from the headlines. Two years ago it was "la canicule", or "heat wave". This year's it was "la fièvre aphteuse". "Fièvre" I knew already. It means "fever". But "aphteuse"? Well, according to the dictionary it means "ulcerous". Ulcerous fever? What on earth is that? I will tell you. It is "foot-and-mouth disease".

Yes, it was while we were on holiday that we read in the local paper, the Sud-Ouest, that Britain had had an outbreak of "fièvre aphteuse" somewhere in Surrey, probably caused by an escape of the virus from a nearby research station. You could sense the gritted teeth through which Sud-Ouest reported the news. Mon Dieu, the Brits are up to their silly games again, unleashing their stupid little diseases on the unsuspecting continent and ruining everything for us...

And it did indeed put a few spanners in the works in France. You must not imagine that the French always ignore regulations and restrictions, as we like to believe. There was a big local livestock show that very week near us in France which had to be cancelled because of hastily introduced regulations about foot-and-mouth and animal transport. There was even a question mark over the local bullfighting season...

Oh, yes, bullfighting is alive and well in the south-west of France, even if most of the stars are Spanish imports. Every day in the local French papers there were reports of the previous evening's corridas. And they also have their own form of bull sport down in Les Landes called "courses landaises", in which the bull or fierce cow is not injured at all. The idea is for daring young men to get as close as possible to the enraged unit of cattle and even somersault through their horns as they pass underneath. I went to a session of it once and did not enjoy it, especially when one young man was badly gored. It was on that evening that I decided my long fading romance with bullfighting, which started many years before with one of El Cordobes's early appearances, was well and truly over.

Interestingly, a lot of French now feel the same. There is a powerful anti-bullfighting lobby in France. While I was over there, they tried to put a 30-second commercial on French television showing how cruel it was. The commercial was banned. Why? Because the regulator thought people might be distressed by the cruelty of the bullfighting which was shown. So the cruelty can be seen live, in an arena, but not on film in a protest against it. I wonder if Descartes could explain that one to me...

Here in Britain things are still not back to normal. I had hoped to be going tomorrow to the Priddy Sheep Fair, a great annual event in the Mendips where country folk flock together to sell each other things neither of them really needs, but their website says it has been cancelled reluctantly because of foot-and-mouth.

Luckily, not so the Frome Show (formerly the Frome Cheese Show) which takes place on 8 September and which nobody should miss. Last year we took along a visitor from London who was staying with us, a high-powered urban PR lady who has seen and done it all, and she was absolutely knocked sideways by the Frome Show. We had to put her into emergency 24-hour therapy to persuade her not to move to the country and keep exotic chickens.

One last thought on foot-and-mouth. The other day we were talking to a farmer at a local farmer's market who raises cows and pigs and makes excellent sausages. She said that at the moment she is forbidden by livestock restrictions to move a sow across the road to a new pen, or to lead any of her cows to a new field even though it is all on the same Wiltshire farm.

"Yet along the road outside our farm they have been driving lorries from Surrey taking all the infected carcasses from the affected areas down there to the site in Somerset where they were going to destroy them. Where is the logic in that?"

Another one for you, Descartes.

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