Jeremy Clarke has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Here, as in Britain, everyone is a log expert. The woodman leaves a heap at the bottom of the drive and almost everyone subsequently walking past it stops to tell you’ve been conned, that that’s never a stère, it’s half more like. (A measure of logged wood in France was set in 1793 at one cubic metre and is called a stère. It’s about 12 wheelbarrow loads.)
The woodman fastened his nose on my Barbour and inhaled fanatically. ‘Barbour,’ he said. ‘Oh-la-la-la-la’
How much did you pay for that, they say? So you tell them and they laugh in your face at your inadmissible complacency. High-ranking log police might then select a log from your heap and weigh it in an etiolated hand and pronounce it wet or unseasoned and further evidence that you’ve been taken for a royal idiot.
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