“I'm from Burgundy,” says our Parisian neighbour, who has spent her whole life in Paris

It's time to leave Paris for summer. It is getting hard to find anywhere to eat: even the Chinese-run sushi places are closing for August. Fewer motorbikes than usual whiz along the pavements. The locals are disappearing to the French countryside, the place they like to imagine they are really from.

Every rich country has its own way of holidaying (except Japan, where proper holidays barely exist, and the US, where they exist chiefly for children). I first noticed the different national quirks as a child, living in Sweden and later in the Netherlands. The Swedish ideal seemed to be to holiday alone, on an island, preferably naked, with a bottle of vodka. The Dutch, by contrast, preferred reassuringly noisy campsites populated by lots of other Dutch people. But I now live in the country where holidays go deepest into the national psyche. For the French, August is the return to their rural past.