As someone who has been addicted to France since my first family camping holiday when I was four years old, it is a privilege to be editor of France Magazine and to be bringing the latest news and happenings in France to readers of Times Online’s travel section.

Each month, I’ll be dipping into my little black book of contacts in France to bring you a monthly insight into hidden France, giving you the chance to find out why I, and our UK- and US-based readers, adore the place, its people and its lifestyle.

After a very wet May and June, my contributors resident in southwest France are celebrating the return of the sun. Gascony in particular has been feeling very soggy recently, with farmers tearing their hair out over ruined crops.

According to local author and France Magazine columnist Amanda Hodgkinson, however, the rain offered a chance for one group of commuters to enjoy some good old-fashioned hospitality.

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After an embankment collapsed on to the railway line and halted their journey from Toulouse to Auch, 40 passengers ventured out across the fields in hail stones the size of gobstoppers in an attempt to get home. Seeking refuge from the storm, they asked a local farmer’s wife, Bernadette, if they could shelter in her barn; a request she refused.

Instead, she insisted they come into her kitchen where she and a friend served them a feast of Gascon delights such as confit de canard, sliced hams, saucisson, drinks and coffee, until a bus came to collect them all at 11pm.

When the story was published in the local paper La Depeche du Midi, Bernadette was quoted as saying that it had broken her heart to see the passengers looking bedraggled and that entertaining them was the least she could do. It just goes to show, the French can turn any crisis into a gastronomic event.

Further east, residents of Montpellier are heading to the beach to enjoy the sun, and among them is writer Louise Taylor who tells me she’s keen to get down to her favourite beach bar, La Voile Bleue. These temporary stylish hang-outs pop up every summer along the coast of the Med, and are the ideal place to sip a glass of Blanquette de Limoux (Languedoc’s finest fizz) as the sun goes down. See her pick of the best beach bars here.

Event organisers throughout France are hoping for sunny skies to aid their sound and light shows (Son et Lumière). These fantastic spectacles have popped up all over France in recent years to the delight of adults and children.

Among the best is Le Mans’ La Nuit des Chimères, in which colourful patterns and images are projected against the magnificent gothic cathedral and other buildings in the medieval old town. The show recounts much of the town’s Plantagenet history in glorious Technicolor.

Meanwhile, at Le Manoir de Mongrenier in Brittany, which is owned by France Magazine readers Chris and Carol Sealy, 50 French and British actors will be playing-out a love story set in the Battle of the Thirty, during the Hundred Year’s War. This, as well as music and a medieval-style banquet, will take place at the13th century manor house on July 24-26, 31 and August 1-2.

And finally, my Dordogne-based colleague Vincent Bertin is looking forward to the preview night of "My Beautiful Festival", a Franco-British film festival in Bergerac on July 26.

The festival will take off in earnest next year, but for 2008 the ex-pat and local population will get a taste of what’s to come with showings of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky (subtitled in French) and Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon’s Rumba (subtitled in English) as well as a BBQ and a concert.

Carolyn Boyd is editor of France Magazine

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