Out of the blue, I was asked to interrupt the daily bout of political analysis and all those weighty reflections on whether my suddenly high achieving football team would snatch the Championship title today. THEY DID!!!!!
Would I return to a theme that has produced lively discussion at that Other Place where my old blog languishes in a remote outpost for the discarded and forgotten called Archived Bloggers?
The subject: all those young French men and women who put balance into the exchange of Frogs and Rosbifs by flocking to Britain in search of the jobs beyond their reach at home.
I am not sure for how long that link to the online version of my Daily Express article will remain operative.
But in any case, while the presidential decider add a little spice to the recipe, the ingredients are familair enough to readers of Salut!.
Craig McGinty, who runs This French Life among other sites about expat life, gave me his thoughts during the preparation of my piece.
He thought it was the former prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin who once summed it up as France getting our oldies in return for sending its youngsters to Britain (I haven't yet been able to dig out the original quote).
That certainly was the case, as old people sold up in Britain, making a killing on their houses there and snapping up bargains in France.
The attactions were obvious: better weather, the perception of a far higher quality of life with better public services, less stress and all that cheap wine and sumptuos food.
Some were better at integrating with the French than others, and some infuriated otherwise open-minded locals by importing materials and even labour for the work they needed doing on their newly-acquired by often rundown properties.
But there has been change, with more and more younger families, people who still need to work, coming to France intent on earning a living and needing to. A lot are self-employed or have the kind of skills that cross borders, including language barriers, with ease.
However, it remains the case that almost every French person you speak to has a relative or friend who has taken the migratory path the opposite way.
I am impressed by thev testimony of such people as Vladimir Cordier, with whom I renewed electronic acquaintance for the article. He abandoned Normandy and France after graduating in economics, having been warned by a professor that a decent job would be hard to come by, and has built a successful new life in London.
He has also, since we last spoke, created a website with the express purpose of advising other young French people tempted to join him, a venture inspired by all the publicity he attracted for his book Enfin Un Boulot (At Last a Job).
There is another side to the story, which I have also discussed in the past and touched on fleetingly in my Express article today: many of those refugees from a society where the desire to work is not always rewarded have to make do with self-explanatory mcjobs.
Vladimir cautions against this option. Call centre work may not pay terribly well either, he says, but experience of that kind looks a whole lot better when you try to move on to something better.
In my part of the Var, the temptation for graduates and post-Bac students to head for Britain is strong. A lot of thw work here is seasonal, uninspiring and poorly rewarded.
But as the other side of the property wealth of the British expats, there is one other factor they ought to take into account before making the leap.
As well as they are doing in their London jobs, Vladimir and his girlfriend, Anne-Sophie Cavil, originally from Brittany, still cannot envisage buying a place of their own.
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