It may appear that this column is a little obsessed with France, but the country does seem to be falling to bits, and it is always nice to see folly running unconfined through a society other than one's own. France has banned smoking. It has redefined the term "bank robber". Its president has started behaving like a less intelligent member of a boy band - and ended up as the unwitting star of the Ryanair ads in the process.
And now the concierge is threatened with extinction.
The concierge is that terrifying figure who stands guard over French apartments. She used to have a little curtained office in the hall from which she could observe the goings-on in her block.
She mediated between warring tenants, she called the plumber, she greeted each day with a frown - in other words, she was a spy.
Now the concierge has been overtaken by the electronic security system and as a species is markedly on the wane.
According to a report last month in the Times of London, the number of concierges in France has fallen by 10,000 in the past 10 years. The wages for a concierge are about €12,000 per annum, plus the same amount again in government charges to the employers.
The concierge had a very important social function, although no one can actually name it. Not only was she effectively the lone housewife in an apartment block full of workers - taking in deliveries, letting people into their homes when they had forgotten their keys, making sure that elderly residents were all right - she also had a more general role in law enforcement.
She tackled any bad behaviour that occurred in public, in a way which is only a dim memory for most modern police forces.
The concierge was always on the beat. She never had a squad car to cruise around in. Her policy was one of zero tolerance.
God help you if you threw litter on the section of pavement which the concierge swept daily, as she gathered the local gossip. God help you if you parked across the entrance to her block of flats.
Because her duties were totally domestic - traditional women's work, and thus viewed as trivial - she was actually allowed latitude, and kept an eye on a wide variety of things.
Here was someone who knew the shopkeepers, the police officers and the bin men of her neighbourhood. She had no compunction about correcting other people's children. The speciality of the concierge was communication, or in the case of the adulterous liaisons in which the French like to present themselves as expert, non-communication. Anyone who ever wondered at the privacy of a French apartment block had the concierge to thank for it.
The remaining concierges even have their own magazine, a sure sign of professional pride. It is an in-house publication, as it were, called L'Écho des Concierges. Recently 100 concierges joined forces to lobby parliament about the endangered future of their calling. These are not people to mess with.
In Russia the babushka was a similar figure. The babushka was the only person, in Soviet times, who would take on the authorities . The Russian respect for anyone who had survived the second World War protected her when she tackled officialdom, and even young men were frightened of her. It was a very old lady with a broom who saved me from a nasty situation - being physically threatened in the street by a stranger - when I was walking about Moscow alone, many years ago.
This tiny creature saw off the terrifying presence in no time. I could only babble English at her in relief as she, toothless and fearless, babbled at me in Russian. I cannot remember now if I even knew the Russian for thank you.
In New York they have the all-powerful doorman, a vital figure for any apartment dweller. And what do we have, in our blocks of new apartments? No one. No one to change the light bulbs in the hall, to let in the plumber, or to keep an eye on things. No one to make sure that drivers do not empty their ashtrays on to the tarmac of those expensive parking spaces.
Irish apartments come with no maintenance facilities at all, let alone a concierge. It is hardly surprising so many of them are empty (although I noticed in yesterday's paper that a concierge was a selling point for apartments in Clontarf).
In Ireland our old people have been swept out of the cities, and even out of the smaller towns. We have lost a lot, at a time when we need more supervision of our communal life, not less.
We have lost a whole generation of people who had a very clear idea of what constitutes good behaviour, who knew that it is the small things in life that matter, and who were unafraid to voice their view. It would be interesting to see the reaction of a French concierge on an Irish street when Irish adults cycle on the footpath as they so blithely do, at least in Dublin. Perhaps the folks beyond Clontarf should buy some decommissioned concierges in... now that the French appear to be finished with them.
