THERE are times when it pays to be patient. I drive other people mad by never changing the clock on my van, but I know that if I wait patiently through the winter, after six months it will be telling the right time again, and I won’t have had to annoy myself by trying to fiddle with those awkward little controls. Fashions are also like this: if you could have stood the ridicule in the ‘80s then those bell-bottomed trousers from the ‘70s would have been right back there in the cutting edge of fashion.

So it was that France launched its nuclear programme in the brave new world of the ‘60s when every house was going to have its own robot, we would be flying everywhere on Concorde, and nylon was going to be the answer to everything from underpants to bedsheets.

As with all fashions, it fell from grace. The nylon pants got consigned to the bin and the rest of the world decided that they were better off burning fossil fuels than trying to make electricity from anything quite so complicated as a nuclear reactor, especially when they saw what happened to Chernobyl. But France stuck doggedly to the nuclear route, generating most of her electricity in this way, and not giving a stuff about the environmentalists. In fact, they even sent some of them to the bottom of Auckland harbour when their protests started to get a bit too irritating.

As the world carried on turning it soon became obvious that depending on fossil fuels was backing the wrong horse. OPEC and the Russians have decided to hold the world to ransom, the environmentalists have told everybody that fossils are for the museums and not for burning, and the only thing that you can burn are renewables.

Enter stage left, La Belle France, with her huge swathes of forest that she didn’t cut down to feed an industrial revolution and build a navy to conquer the world, and a wealth of nuclear power stations. This means that while other countries are doubling their prices for the consumer to reflect higher fuel prices, the price for electricity is stable here. Nuclear is still expensive but no more expensive than it was last year, and cheap wood is available to anybody who wants to have a real fire.

This doesn’t mean that fuel prices are not hitting the French. They are naturally thrifty and have apparently cut down on their vehicle fuel consumption by more than 10 per cent to save a few Euros. With most of France being largely rural, there is not much in the way of piped gas infrastructure, and so a great many homes are equipped with oil-fired central heating (as are we), which can easily cost the best part of a couple of thousand Euros per year to run. The answer to this is to buy a wood burner, which gives you a tax credit against the purchase price and keeps you fit with all the wood chopping and carrying. One friend of mine has even converted his oil boiler to run on chip fat, which is a lot cheaper but does make you yearn for a side order of mayonnaise when you enter his house.

I seem to remember that back in the ‘70s every house was equipped with a bottle of Warninks advocat (to make a snowball, whatever that was) and to the best of my knowledge nobody ever drunk it, so I reckon that if everybody was to send me their old unused bottles I could easily get enough to run my van and my boiler for the next year at least. Not fashionable, but effective.