The difference seems to be, however, that while French bureaucrats have a genius for dreaming up new and minutely-detailed regulations, the British genius is for finding people who will enforce every regulation come what may.

The French version is on visible display in the little seaside town of Wimereux, which is some three miles north of Boulogne.

It has a very handsome promenade, known as le Digue, and – at low tide –a vast expanse of seashore.

All year round, there are signs at every access point to the Digue
which show that dogs and bicycles are not allowed, and roller-blades not after 11am.

And this being France, a country where the bureaucrats live in one dimension and everyone else in a completely different one, there are dogs galore, usually quite a few cyclists and any number of children on roller-blades.

For July and August, the pen-pushers in the Mairie devised a complex system of dividing the shore into broad zones for swimming, sailing, kite-surfing, windsurfing and jet-skiing. Each zone is marked out by long lines of yellow buoys, and, in fact, it is not a bad idea, if accidents are to be avoided

But where the Digue finishes at one end and rocks take over, they have decided swimming is not to be allowed at all; instead, the area
is given over to kite-surfers, windsurfers and recreational craft with motors – each to keep to its own tidily-marked area as shown by an unintelligible plan on a huge sign.

Unfortunately, this part of the beach happens to be almost inaccessible to everyone except swimmers. Plus, only in the mind of a bureaucrat do kite-surfers and windsurfers stay in lanes; in the real world, they sweep backwards and forwards across the wind for perhaps a quarter-of-a-mile in each direction.

Never mind. The bureaucrats are happy because they've created some new rules (and spent some of the public's money) and at the same time – this being France – the public is not been seriously inconvenienced, or, indeed, inconvenienced at all. The swimmers certainly are not: that
bit of sea usually has five or six bobbing around in it.

Don't scoff: things could be a great deal worse. Cross the Channel
to England and you will soon see how.

Here a grandmother was prevented from taking snaps of an outdoor pool at an unearthly hour in the morning because of a rule intended to protect children from the attention of paedophiles.

Airline pilots going through airport security checks had to hand over containers in their hand luggage with liquids in them because of new security rules: never mind that a terrorist pilot could simply put his plane into an irreversible dive, or fly it into a mountainside.

And, at Dover, I met a security official who chose my vehicle for a random security check which left me deeply puzzled.

In the back we had a dining table, four chairs and a bicycle wheel – all highly visible – as well as two large bags of bedding and various other household items.

The official asked me to unlatch the bonnet and the tailgate, and after I had opened the bonnet for her, she peered at the engine and then complained that it was placed so far back she couldn't see what was behind it.

Clearly disappointed, she inquired if I had a long-bladed knife in the car. I said I hadn't, and wondered afterwards what she would have done if I had produced a cutlass for cutting back rampant garden weeds. Might she think I'd storm the bridge with it?

Examining what we had in the back of the car, she was very interested in one of the large soft-sided bags of bedding, poking it experimentally and, much to her satisfaction, finding something hard in it. Ah! What had we here?

A toilet bag, it turned out. Please could she see inside it? So I showed her, and offered, sarcastically, to turn out its contents.

Meanwhile, one of her colleagues was looking beneath the car with a long-handled mirror.

What, I wondered in a bemused way as I joined a line of cars waiting for the ferry, was all that about?

Presumably someone thinks that people using cross-Channel ferries are potential terrorists, bent on forcing the captain to steer the ship on to rocks or head for a terrorist-friendly state.

Or is there a notion that since travelling by air has been made extremely unpleasant thanks to all the security checks, the least
that can be done is to spread a bit of the misery to cross-Channel
ferry passengers?

And then I discovered the answer. The checks, I was told, are carried out only on the English side – once travellers have disembarked the ferry. You simply could not make up such an illogical policy.