When we bought our first French car, it still carried Paris plates. Out here in the rural wilds of the Orne, the number '75' in the registration drew stares of disapproval and scorn. Even the British are better liked than Parisians. We made sure to get the plates changed to a local registration - as is demanded by law - as fast as we could.

Every french département is numbered, mostly in alphabetic order so that neighbouring regions generally have wildly different numbers. Kids generally learn this numbering system by playing registration spotting games while on trips - which also has the benefit of keeping them amused during long journeys.

When the idea of doing away with local registrations was first mooted, to conform to EU regulations, most french people simply dismissed it as unlikely. Just a few months ago, when we bought our most recent car, the garage owner scoffed at the very idea of change.

But now it seems it is really about to happen. Parisians will not longer have reason to feel superior. We country yokels will have no occasion for inverted snobbery. Another strain of french snootiness will disappear forever. I can't imagine anyone will really miss it.

Most of our six cats hunt. Mini, our six month-old kitten is a savage killer and is busily decimating the vole, shrew and mouse populations of Normandy. When we came back from a week's holiday recently, there were six corpses in the living room and kitchen. According to the friends who were looking after the place, there were none the day before.

They're not all dead, though. Often Mini brings one in as a toy and plays with it until it breaks. Then she gets another.

When we hear that pathetic, high-pitched squeaking, or the chittering of a shrew, we do our best to rescue the poor critter. I'm not sure why, but it seems the right thing to do.

And so, the other night I found myself racing around the living room trying to corner a tiny mouse in which Mini had already lost all interest (she'd gone for a snack). I finally managed to grab it - not an easy feat given that I was wearing gardening gloves and it was one of the smallest mice I'd ever seen. Nevertheless, its heart was beating hard enough for me to feel it through the thick leather.

I stepped outside into total darkness. It was around 9pm, overcast and drizzling. Normally I would have walked across the courtyard and set the poor blighter free in the shrubbery, but I couldn't see where I was stepping and, with the gloves on, couldn't pluck my LED torch from my pocket. I reached down, close to the ground, opened my hand and ... felt the tiny animal run up my arm.

I was wearing a fisherman's jumper with crew neck (that's relevant - you'll see). It was hard to track the mouse's movement through the thick, loosely-knit wool, but I knew it had reached my shoulder. I didn't want to go back into the lighted living room because that would have been to deliver the mouse to a savage fate. Instead, I opened the door a crack and called for Trish, saying "bring a torch".

She did. In the meantime, though, I hadn't felt any movement. Trish searched me and declared me mouse-free. The brave little chap must have jumped, we thought, though a nagging doubt remained.

We watched an hour's TV, with me lying on the sofa as usual. Then we retired to the office where we blogged and surfed for perhaps another hour. Then back to the living room to prepare for bed - dog out, lights off, dog in, door locked. Anything else? It was while I stood going through the nightly checklist that I became aware of a new noise, a kind of rapid, high-pitched panting, very close and just behind me. I reached back over my left shoulder and explored my jumper. Sure enough, just below the neckline was a small bump.

"Trish," I called, "I don't think that mouse has gone."

She arrived, liberated the wee timorous beastie from my jumper and finally set it free. That was one lucky mouse - for now.

One of the things that sold us this house was its age. Our fantasy was to live in a castle — ideally, St Mawes in Cornwall. We didn't quite achieve that, but our house was built around 1500, using massive granite blocks in many places, so that parts of it have the feel of an ancient fortress. Indeed, local legend has it that the building was used as the village stronghold in times of trouble.

The massive size of many of the granite blocks, particularly around the doors and windows, suggest that the original owner of the house was wealthy. This is supported by the amount of carving — again, around and over the doors and windows — and the size of the fireplace, which is about 2.5m wide and nearly a metre deep.

In fact, we've sort of met the original proprietor. On each side of the main fireplace is a carved head — one of our favourite features of the house. At least, the carving on the left is of a head. We thought the carving on the right was unfinished — there are no facial features and the corbel above it is also cruder than that above the head on the other side. Then a local historian put us right.

The head on the left of the fireplace is that of the 'seigneur', the master of the house, which is why his corbel gets the more ornate treatment. Once there would have been a phallus beneath the head, but this has typically been removed in a later, more prudish time. The carving on the right commemorates the lady of the house — not by portraying her face but by representing a lower, more intimate part of her anatomy (see second picture, left).

We've always known that there were two more carved heads in the house. They are in the bedroom, again either side of a fireplace (though most of the rest of the fireplace, including corbels and chimney, is now long gone). But, in the eleven years we've owned the property, we'd only glimpsed these carvings. That's because they were behind a massive bed with built-in wardrobes that came with the house.

Yesterday, we dismantled the bed, prior to selling it and got our first good look at the two characters who've been sharing our home for more than a decade.

The head on the right, complete with beard (see first picture, top of page) is the best original feature in the house. And his phallus seems to be intact! We presume that the face on the left (bottom pic) is the mistress of the house. It's actually a face this time, so it's hard to tell, especially with the nose missing. I suggested to Trish that we can tell it's a female because her mouth is open. This wasn't well received.

The small town of Erné has always been quiet before. We've had lunch there, done a bit of shopping. Invariably it has been pretty empty — to the point of desertion.

Last Saturday, though, it had 5,000 visitors — friendly, well-behaved, good-natured, even festive, but all angry about something. A couple of things, actually. They don't care for the plan by EDF and the French Government to build a new European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) at Cherbourg. France may run on nuclear energy, but these people feel it's time to look at alternatives. And they're even less impressed by other plans to cut a swathe through bocage country with an avenue of monstrous pylons and Très Haute Tension (THT) power lines. Health hazards and environmental despoilation are just two of their worries.

See our photography portfolio for pictures of the manifestation.

It's debatable whether these demonstrations achieve much, other than allowing people to feel that they can make their feelings clear. Maybe that's a good enough reason.

I have to confess, though, that I also find a manif on a sunny weekend can be tremendous fun. Maybe that's why the French have so many of them. You get together with a few thousand like-minded people, do a lot of singing and banging drums (or tin cans) and enjoy a brisk walk. Inevitably it ends in a town square with a beer tent and food vendors.

So, if you're looking for something interesting to do in a quiet French town, pick one with a manifestation. It certainly livens up an otherwise quiet day.