It's months since my last blog update, but I've got a good excuse - I've been filling in some forms. Then filling in some more. Then re-filling the same ones. Then trying to locate ancient documents that haven't seen the light of day since Stock Aitken & Waterman dominated the charts (cue the sound of the under 40s reaching for Google). In short, I've been battling French paperwork (and what speaks volumes about my progress in learning French is that last week I googled the French for 'bureaucracy').

France however does have something of a reputation for being 'en amour' with bureaucracy which is only to be expected as they invented the word. That said, England invented football and no-one could claim they're any good at that. What goes with loving the country though is embracing the paperwork. And that's been tough, even speaking as a civil servant who earlier this year got a form returned because my autograph crept outside the miniscule signature box.

The start of my French ordeal came with deciding to have a stall on the local market. You can't just rock up on the day like Dell Boy would, you need to formally register as a small business in advance. Which I guess is fair enough.

So, I tackled the painfully complicated language of the application form with the help of a sympathetic French speaker, who herself gave up before the end of the saga. Three weeks of work saw it finally finished, but I somehow suspected that submitting the form would end the process in much the way that the Brexit vote has settled the question of EU membership. That is, not at all.

When a fat wadge of papers and forms came back from the town hall, what I wasn't expecting was that they would need to see a copy of my marriage certificate (BIFF!), a copy of my wife's birth certificate (SPLATT!!), confirmation of how sickness and insurance costs would be met (BAM!!!), and require my attendance at an obligatory, week-long course in how to run a business (KAPOW!!!!). The fact that I have a Business degree counted for nothing.

Like Brexit, this process is going to run and run, but for possibly longer. I suspect that by the time the paperwork to-ing and fro-ing finishes, I'll have forgotten what it was I was trying to do in the first place.

Aside from my problems in registering as a business, French bureaucracy has also produced some other unusual quirks. For example, on my attempt to join a fitness class, I was told that I needed to have a GP assessment and a note confirming that I was unlikely to collapse / die at the class. Either I must be looking a lot worse than I thought, or that gentle yoga wasn't so gentle after all. SNCF demanding the full names, gender and ages of all people for whom I was booking train tickets seems like smooth efficiency after that.

That said, I was chatting to a musician who wanted to busk around the local bars. He trumped my frustrations about registering as a business by pointing out that he was told that he had to submit the set-list of songs that he was going to play in advance. Yes, really. When asked why, he was given an explanation that was more complicated than anything Ted Rogers came up with on 3-2-1 (cue more juvenile googling).

Change is in the air though. Francois Fillon, the red hot favourite to become the new French President next May has promised to lay off 500,000 civil servants (in Grandstand tele-printer fashion, that's 'half a million'). The country will surely grind to a halt.

France does not have a monopoly on bureaucracy though. When my son first had a paper round, he had a contract of employment (!) that stretched to 20-odd pages (!!). That is longer than the contract of employment for permanent work with the National Assembly for Wales. Further afield, up until the 1970s, if you wanted to join the Chinese civil service, you were invited into a room containing a desk, chair, paper and pencil and told to write down everything you know. Wow, as interview questions go that's a toughie.

I guess that the lesson here is that deep down people just love bureaucracy as it brings order, structure, consistency and stability. What is doesn't bring is stalls on French markets and buskers in pubs.