Alarming news sweeps along the coast.
Métropole is an important looking monthly, printed on shiny paper and circulating - for our purposes - in the areas of Toulon, Hyères and La Seyne.
The front page of the current edition, tells of Nicolas Sarkozy's emphatic Blue Wave - the one he did get, in the presidentials, as opposed to the one he (small hurrah) didn't, in the parliamentaries.
The main picture illustrates a feature on that old standby, property prices, and we are also directed towards a piece about the flower market of Hyères that manages to clock up 150 million of sales a year.
Not flagged on page one is a short article linked to that cover story about property prices. Les étrangers toujours très présents, runs the headline.
Beneath, the sub-heading Welcome In Lorgues - no translation was thought necessary - Olivier Stéphan tells of the Var town where the Brits are not just coming, but have come, seen and conquered.
This little place, 40 miles or so into the Toulon hinterland and approached by a lush, almost Dordogne-like road from Vidauban, has effectively become an English colony "in the manner of certain little towns in south-western France", asserts the author.
Seduced by the quality of life, waves of Brits have chosen to settle there, says M Stéphan before adding:
Word of mouth has done the rest. More and more subjects of Her Majesty the Queen have abandoned the London fog for the sunshine of the Midi, to the extent that British citizens are now in the majority. And not without posing some genuine problems for the local infrastructure, notably school admissions for the children of these adopted Varois (people of the Var).
The horror felt at such a prospect by some at this grotesque manifestation of the colonial tendencies of l'Albion perfide, and in particular by my occasional correspondent Richard of Orléans, can only be imagined.
It is undeniably hypocritical of Brits already here to wince at the thought of being overrun by their fellow countrymen. But people like Richard - and indeed moi-même- get away with it on the grounds of having married into French families.
But in any case, the story falls at the first hurdle. The good French folk of Lorgues can sleep more easily in their beds in the knowledge, passed to me by the admirable Gilles Hardouin, director of cabinet at the mairie, that it simply isn't true.
Out of around 10,000 inhabitants, he tells me (breaking occasionally, "for the practice", into impressive English), only 15 per cent are foreigners, and these include people, familiar throughout France, from the former French colonies of north Africa).
Even among the Europeans, we are still not the most numerous. The Dutch, it seems, are there in yet greater numbers. The assertions in the article are therefore, M Hardouin adds robustly en anglais, "absolutely stupid".
Where les Rosbifs are way out in front, he further informs me, is in being plus communautaire, a polite way of saying we don't - with honourable exceptions - integrate terribly well. This, my friend at the mairie excuses as a "question of culture".
By the time I am told all of this, I have devoted a lot of time and money - very well then, a visit one evening for a slightly dull concert, followed by a good but London-priced meal - to making inquiries about the British invasion.
So I offer no comradely support to Métropole's directeur, Alain Perrier, when noting that the mairie is less forgiving of the media being, shall we say, extravagant with the truth than it is of keep-to-themselves Brits. A demand for a right of reply will shortly be landing on his desk.
But M Perrier's paper has an edition covering the Dordgone, it should dispatch a team of reporters to the attractive but rather congested town of Sarlat.
There, less than a year ago, a hotelier spoke to me in perfectly welcoming tones about the Brits who have come to dominate the area, but drew the line at the existence of shops where, she insisted, the staff do not speak French.
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