I’m still in the South of France but thinking I’d better write a column for you from here rather than take the week off as I had planned, otherwise The Times will fire up some eager young Shadow Cabinet minister as a replacement, to plug the hole with his outline for an overhaul of the recycling laws as they relate to kitchen compost (non-proteinous) or something, and you’ll all be so bored you’ll cancel your subscriptions and there’ll be no readers left for me to write for when I get home.

Speaking of Shadow ministers, I got a text message on Monday from the wife of a real minister, a government one, to say that she had read my article last week about the ludicrous Citroën with no handbrake I hired in Nice, which has rolled backwards into every wall, car, tree, dog and quack frog doctor with a bag full of unnecessary suppositories from here to Avignon.

“I am in France as well,” she texts, “staying in a vertiginous village with same car with same no handbrake and have caused several accidents already. X*, who doesn’t drive, just thinks I’m driving like a maniac. I’ll be using your article in the French courts when I fight Avis over the insurance claim on our car.”

(* minister’s name withheld to avoid embarrassment over non-possession of driving licence revelation).

And she is not alone. Dozens of you have e-mailed to say that you have been fobbed off by Avis in France with the same Citroën and its “automatic handbrake”.

“I can understand replacing a gearstick with an automatic shift,” writes Harold from Leamington Spa. “And I think we all agree that it was a good idea to get rid of the crank-starter on the front of the car, but what kind of garlic-toting loon abolishes the handbrake? I’ve hit the wall outside my rented villa three times and made a big hole in it. When executing a three-point turn on the edge of a cliff this morning I very nearly ended up dangling off the edge like the bus out of The Italian Job.

“An honest English driver needs a precision instrument for the manual restraint of his rear wheels — this supposed automatic thing is not fit for purpose. It makes you weep to think that 100 years ago Louis Blériot was pioneering international air transit, but today his countrymen can’t even stop a hatchback rolling down a hill.”

A couple of you, following the tone of the minister’s wife, raised concerns about being charged for damages to the rear of the car caused by inadvertent back-roll when you return your Citroën at the end of your holiday.

“Is it, perhaps, deliberately designed,” asks Zoe McQueen from Edmonton, “to trick us into damaging our hire cars and compromising our excess?”

I’m guessing not (mostly for legal reasons), but it’s certainly going to be a welcome little earner for Avis this year. After my first calamitous back-roll into a wall I went to check the bumper and noticed more dents than I could possibly have made.

Luckily, when I dug out the little picture in the paperwork they had given me I saw three crosses printed at the back of the car to indicate that the dents were already there — some other poor bugger having failed to get the hang of it before me — and I was in the clear. Thus, pre-exonerated, I have been merrily reversing into things deliberately in small villages all over France in the middle of the night and zooming away, giggling madly.

So the lesson is, if you are hiring a Citroën in France this year simply demand one that is already badly damaged at front and back. The Avis girls will probably look baffled, angry and uncomprehending, but then they always do.

• We’ve spent the past few nights at a v posh hotel in the hills above Antibes: 30-odd rooms, famous garden restaurant that non-guests have to book months in advance, beautiful Art Deco pool and prices that could curdle gin (as in: “Shall I have the turbot, or shall we send the kids to a decent school?”).

It also has a marvellous family feel, in the (unusual) sense that all the women staying here seem to be from the same family. On the first day I noticed three sisters, all blonde ladies in their late fifties, sitting by the pool, and thought how nice it was that they all still holidayed together.

Later, they were joined by two more, these ones almost certainly twins: 50ish, same hair, same nose, same smile, same boobs. I marvelled at the procreativity of their mother and father, and at the strength of their family ties.

But when, at lunch the next day, I saw three more of their sisters sitting with their own fat, wealthy husbands, picking at the radish salad (“hold the oil, no salt, if I even see bread I’m calling the gendarmes”) I could hold my peace no longer.

“It’s mad,” I said to Esther. “How can all these women of a similar age possibly have the same parents?”

“You’re so sweet and English,” she said. “They haven’t got the same parents. They’ve just got the same surgeon.”

• There’s a bit of an unseemly pool-bagging system here, which you wouldn’t have expected at such a pukka joint, whereby these idle millionaires go scuttling to the pool on their way to breakfast, and leave books or hats on the sunloungers they think that they may require later.

I just won’t be a part of such grasping, antisocial solipsism and choose to breakfast at my leisure then take my chances by the pool. Yesterday morning I had a nice swim and, finding no lounger unbagged, obviously had to lie on a pre-bagged one.

“You can’t do that!” said an onlooking guest as I picked up his neighbour’s book and flung it aside to make room for my wet arse.

“I most certainly can,” I said. “The geezer’s tried to bag his spot with a David Baldacci. I’m not going to stand here soaking wet to make room for a Baldacci.”

I have since developed in my mind a hierarchy of lounger-bagging enforceability based on literary merit. Later that day I happily gave way to the new Hilary Mantel novel about Thomas Cromwell, because I happen to have packed a copy myself.

I have also respected a dog-eared American paperback of Saul Bellow’s Herzog, two Ian McEwans, three books in French (on the basis that the reader is either making a damn fine effort to get in the local spirit or is actually French, which is quite a novelty round here) and, after hesitation, a biography of Harry Redknapp.

But, ye gods, the Dan Browns, Stieg Larssons, Stephenie Meyers and James Pattersons I have hurled aside to take some sun. One Kathy Reichs, I’m afraid, even disappeared over a stone wall and into the valley below.

I will not give way to books by celebrities either, nor political biographies of anyone born after the First World War, nor faux-lit drivel such as Yann Martel, Aravind Adiga, Mark Haddon, Audrey Niffenegger or Khaled Hosseini — dreary kids’ yarns given prizes because thicko celebrity judges who wished they had never agreed to the job managed to finish them.

It’s a minefield, but I’ve managed to get a tan. So this year, if you’re holidaying where sun space is at a premium and bed-bagging is indulged, be careful what you read.

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