Fidelma Cook passed away last month. We are running a selection of her columns as a tribute. This one is from October 2010. We hope you enjoy it.

THERE are all sorts of rules and regulations in France and it is up to you to find out if they affect you or your house. But, this being France, nobody actually tells you until you unwittingly infringe one of the rules nobody told you about in the first place.

Basically, you have to have an inkling that there might just be a rule to then seek it out. And the rules in one region could be quite different to those in another. Within the region too, the rules can vary enormously depending on the mayor’s fondness for dreaming up new rules and regulations when time hangs heavy on his hands.

Which means a friend seven miles away can inform you of a vital new regulation, which actually doesn’t exist in your village but you don’t know that because the rules are hidden … until you search for them. And so you set off in the wonderful maze of French bureaucracy, usually coming out as bewildered as when you went in.

Being fervently addicted to the Anglo/French forums and the ungrammatical whining of the expats, I find a new rule every day from their moans and take a pathetic delight in informing my little immigrant group of their legal shortcomings. I know, I know, life has reduced to such sad, little, sadistic pleasures. Well, it’s either that or line-dancing for amusement as winter beckons.

We all know, for example, that our insurance is void if we cannot produce a certificate to show that our wood-burning stoves have been swept each year.

If the house goes up in flames because of an electrical fault, an overheating washing machine, a thunderbolt, or even arson – if you don’t have that certificate for a clean chimney you won’t be paid out.

“But if the fire didn’t start in the chimney that’s not fair,” I said to Marc, our extremely good-looking local sweep (as one of only three handsome men in the area, all the women I know would happily pay him to sweep away several times a year regardless of any law, and his arrival guarantees the one day in 365 when I’m up, scrubbed and made-up by noon).

Marc agreed, while swapping the vital paper for €100. “Paris,” he said. “They hate us.” As he can make probably six to seven hundred euros a day during the soot-shovelling season, he must really feel the city’s hate. But hating Paris and the elite who run the country purely to do down the ordinary man and woman is just another line trotted out on every occasion to explain the unexplainable.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I argued.

“Exactly,” he said, triumphantly flashing the full set of teeth, which is a mark of beauty in the Lomagne. “That’s Paris for you.”

Now, I’ve discovered, it is also a law to have your central heating boiler serviced every year, or guess what? Yep, insurance is void. Marc does that too, but sadly not if it gets complicated.

Instead, from the Gers comes a wrinkled, old man in a Gascon beret, who has inadvertently taught me an invaluable stream of glorious curses as he wrestles with my “bitch whore of a boiler”, spitting into its nether regions as I stand downstream. But that’s only when it splutters to a halt and a kick doesn’t start it.

I do not believe in preventative medicine and only get the experts in when things are broken. But it’s the law. So now I have to pay out even though it’s working, albeit with a sharp slap on its vast rump when it occasionally switches itself off.

And, apparently, I should also have a full electrical survey of my house to show all is up to scratch. It’s another new regulation. If our supplier EDF knock on the door and I don’t have it, they will stop giving me electricity.

As they’re due in December to upgrade the lines supplying my house, will they ask for my papers? Therefore, will my insurance be void if I’ve no electricity and the house burns down because of a rogue candle? Is there a candle law I don’t know about, but should? How many candles can I burn, if any?

It also seems that I may be six months out of having a regular termite inspection, although I got full clearance on buying Las Molieres. These ants can nibble away inside your ancient beams, without a powdered sign, until one day you’re sitting happily under them, sipping the vin rouge, writing the column … and bang, deid, as the ceiling collapses.

And that will be my fault too. And of course the insurance will be void even if I have a certificate for a clean chimney. I’m reminded of that old joke about the Wee Free minister ranting about hell.

“I didnae ken,” shouts a stricken parishioner.

“Weel, you ken noo,” was the answer. Well I ken noo, but I can’t bloody afford all these certificates when nothing actually appears to be terribly wrong. Actually, ignorance is bliss, isn’t it? Sod it, I’m just an immigrant. What do I know?