A FORMER colleague and his wife stayed overnight on their way back to the Limousin. Strangely, although working with him for years, we’ve only become friends since they came to France not too long after me.

Their experience of France is similar to mine but also, in many ways, very different, reflecting the region they live in.

The Limousin with its cattle farms is much lusher and greener than here, almost Perthshire-like in its form. But also colder and wetter.

I like to see burnt, brown grass to confirm I live for a lot of the year in real heat.

They live in the heart of a pretty village that is becoming over-run by expats, as they like to call themselves.

Perhaps that’s why two delivery services trundle by every week stacked with orders from Tesco, Waitrose and Morrisons.

They tell me of one family, complete with grandmother, who buy nothing, nothing edible anyway, from French shops.

Says M: "They order everything online from the UK, absolutely everything.

"They say their children don’t like French food and will only eat sliced white bread.

"And then we wonder why village by village the weekly markets are shrinking or, in some cases, disappearing all together."

From this conversation we discuss how much France has changed over the past decade.

"The people moving here now will have a completely different experience to us," says S.

"Actually, even they are different; more insular, don’t want to mix. When we first came the Brits were always having drinks parties and we’d be in an out of houses. We shared tips, builders, where to get X and Y but still had a full ‘French’ life as well.

"The new lot will occasionally suggest a drink but it’s always a meet at the pub, so you all pay your round."

The biggest change of all though, we agree, is the variety of food now on offer in the supermarkets.

When we first arrived, used to buying fruit and vegetables flown in from all corners of the globe, the meagre displays in even the biggest shops were dismaying.

Sticking to its protectionist policy meant French-grown food and only when in season. Occasional Spanish oranges or grapes sneaked in.

Now the counters overflow with a huge variety and exotics appear in their own section.

Most of the supermarkets open over lunchtime, where once they didn’t. Some even open for a few hours on Sunday.

Increasingly, large companies and services are offering online access, years after everybody else.

Having large items such as furniture delivered in relatively quick time has, in the past couple of years, become standard. Before, so many obstacles, including huge charges, were put in place that often people gave up in despair.

Even now some companies work on a radius charge and living in the country racks up the cost.

Sadly, great changes have occurred in France’s much vaunted cuisine. The famed, unpretentious family bistros serving good, honest, lovingly-prepared simple meals are becoming as rare as a hen’s teeth.

Instead there’s the ping of the microwave and the bland taste of food produced in vast industrial factories miles away, delivered in refrigerated trucks.

The relatively recent law that forces owners to identify products which could genuinely be called "home-made" has done little to shame them away from the pre-cooked.

Mind you, the workmen who filled these bistros at lunchtime are becoming rarer, too. Too many villages have shuttered houses and tattered For Sale boards. Striking, too, is the number of young men and women who no longer see a future in the contented if hard lives of their ancestors.

And why should they? Travel is cheaper than it’s ever been and they laugh at their grandparents’ genuine astonishment that anyone would want, or need, to leave France.

You, coming on holiday unless you’ve been coming for years, won’t notice most of this or find the decay anything other than charming.

In the bigger towns the markets still throng with visitor and local alike; the tables and chairs still call from outside cafe and restaurant and the fetes continue unchanged, unchallenged.

We white English speaking immigrants are, in most areas, just another layer of life now. Only my older farming neighbours still find it extraordinary that one would leave one’s country for another.

But that, too, will undergo another transformation with Brexit. Many will go back if certain ‘rights’ are not taken account of; others will struggle being suddenly neither fish nor fowl and God knows what will happen if Le Pen becomes president.

Nothing stays the same, however much we may want it to. The secret is to adapt; enjoy those things that make life easier and more comfortable and rail against the others.

And remember, always, that ultimately we’re all strangers in a strange land, however familiar it feels.

And remember, by the mere act of living here, we’re perhaps more adventurous than many and can up sticks as easily as we put them down.

The three of us all agreed that returning to the UK was unlikely.

Frankly what’s happening there frightens us much more than anything happening here. For the moment.