KEY POINTS:
PARIS - The children call him "Postman Patrice". I call him the "feel good facteur".
He is one of the most relentlessly positive and enthusiastic people that I have ever met. Facteur means postman in French. Thus, the "feel good facteur". Get it?
His real name is Christian Sabri. He is our postman in Normandy. He retired this weekend after travelling the same 63km route through the hill villages of Calvados for 32 years.
He is retiring at the age of 60, only eight years older than France's "young", new and equally enthusiastic President, Nicolas Sarkozy. All public servants in France retire at 60, except for politicians. They go on forever.
I chatted to Sabri about the changes that he had seen in the Norman countryside since 1975. His answers were not quite what I had expected.
"There are more people now than when I started, many more," he said. "But they are not country people. They are town people, who live in the country.
"Everywhere you look, there are new houses going up or old ones being restored. When I started my rounds, the countryside around here was full of ruined houses. Not any more.
"At one time, it was only the English who would buy a house without a roof. Now the French, too, have found a taste for old stones. They may not be country people but they want to feel that they are living the country lifestyle."
Sabri's observation about the new flood of "urban" residents in rural France - commuters or internet "remote" workers - is backed by national statistics. Ten years ago, France was still worrying about the "desertification" of rural areas. Now the countryside is gaining 60,000 new inhabitants a year.
All this is inevitable and positive in its way, but also depressing. The same thing happened decades ago in the more densely populated European countries: Britain, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands. It is better that the countryside should be mildly surburbanised rather than simply abandoned.
And Sabri agrees. Up to a point.
Irredeemably positive though he is, he mourns the passing of the traditional, rural France that still existed in the mid-1970s.
There are six farms remaining in the large, sprawling, hill-top commune in the "Suisse Normande" where we have our small house. Sabri could list the names of all the active farmers to whom he delivered mail in 1975. There were 25 of them.
"When I started, everything was still cows and hedges and apple trees and people working in the fields," he said. "Now it is mostly cereals and machinery. You can drive around a whole day and see no one in the fields at all."
He says the changes began in the late 1970s when there was an official drive to "redraw" the boundaries of small fields. Calvados was once famous for its maze of ancient hedgerows. This was the "bocage" - or farmland - country which caused so many problems to the allied armies in the summer of 1944. Some of those ancient hedges remain. Perhaps 80 per cent have been rooted out to create bigger and more efficient fields.
"That's progress," said Sabri. "Or perhaps it's not progress. Things change. Though they don't always get better."
- INDEPENDENT
