Thrill of the chaste. By Catriona Olding

News travels quickly here in the Var, Provence. Within days of the young fishmonger’s starting work in the Intermarché supermarket six miles away, everyone abandoned our village store, Utile, and headed across to see what the fuss was about.

I stood at the back of the fish-counter queue and watched. Yes, the WhatsApp messages were right. He was handsome: pale, twinkly blue eyes, a lovely mouth, a ready smile and good forearms. Chatty and knowledgeable: he held eye contact with each customer in turn and asked how they were before telling them what was fresh in that day and taking their order.

He was generous with portions, too – sometimes adding a little extra for free and saying, ‘See you tomorrow?’

Was it shop charm or flirtatiousness? It didn’t matter. Each woman, regardless of age, left the counter with a silly doting expression on her face. And a lot of fish.

I noticed when I moved to France, aged 51, ten years ago, that young Frenchmen look at and flirt with older women in a way young British men never do. Having been ignored by men my own age or younger in Scotland for a decade, I was taken aback.

Literally. I looked behind me to see who they were looking at.

Even now, when I’m walking or driving through the village, younger men will sometimes look at me, hold a glance and smile fractionally longer than is usual.

Given the age difference, this fleeting exchange can, surely, have little to do with sexual intention. It merely demonstrates a young man’s desire for the dopamine hit of approbation.

I asked around. One male friend said this was nonsense. Young men faced with an attractive woman of any age can’t help themselves.

Another told me that if a young man looked at a young woman, he’d be deliberately ignored, for a while at least. But if he looked at an older woman, she’d notice right away. He added that casual or playful flirting was akin to a predator eyeing up prey when it wasn’t hungry.

The girlfriends I asked, aged from mid-50s to 83, enjoyed the gentle flirting opportunities afforded by youthful Frenchmen but weren’t interested in analysing why.

‘It’s great!’ said one of them – a super-fit 55-year-old, before admitting she’d avoided a speeding fine last summer by flirting outrageously with the two young policemen who stopped her.

Brigitte Bardot once said, ‘I have always adored beautiful young men. Just because I grew older, my taste doesn’t change. So if I can still have them, why not?’

But when I was young, male beauty meant nothing to me. I was a silly, ludicrously pretentious student nurse and thought the few good-looking men I met – doctors I worked with or the boys my friends and I met in pubs or clubs – were vain, arrogant, stupid or dull.

Perhaps because I’d been an ugly child and bullied on account of it, even though I became quite pretty as a teenager, my own vanity made me fear rejection.

As I got older – 25 years too late and, let’s face it, uglier again – I began to appreciate youthful male beauty. Not in a lascivious way – I was married. But even now I’m single, romance with a younger man is out of the question; I’m too maternal. Still, I enjoy the company of the few younger male friends I have. I live above a village in a cave house at the top of a steep cliff path and need help with barrowing wood up for the fire, keeping the garden tidy and fixing stuff.

I’ve got to know the lads who help and sometimes they come in for a drink. Because they don’t like wine and I never have beer, they’ve taken to gin and tonic.

They confide in me about their relationships; one visit full of love and optimism, the next sad because it hasn’t worked out. I listen to their political opinions.

We have a laugh but there’s no flirting. That happens only in public with slight acquaintances or strangers.

Older men, though, can be a nuisance. I was once pinned against a sofa at a party in Edinburgh by the then richest – and that night probably the drunkest – man in Scotland. He looked into my eyes while stroking and repeatedly lifting my long red hair with both hands, and told me he was in love with the most beautiful woman in the world.

He sang ‘Puff, the Magic Dragon’ to me as if it were a love song. Both his wife and his mistress were only a few feet away. No danger of that sort of thing with young men.

A French friend, André, who turned 80 last year, spent 40 years in England. He thinks flirting is a cultural and genetically- driven pastime for Frenchmen, who adore the company of women – while British men, more reserved and anxious about rejection, prefer the familiarity of their own gender, in the form of competitive masculine company in pubs.

These days, post #MeToo, André, a terrific lifelong flirt himself, is scared of causing offence. He prefers women of any age to flirt with him.

Catriona Olding wrote a tribute to her late husband, Jeremy Clarke, in Clarke’s Low Life: The Spectator Columns – The Final Years (Quartet Books)