Several months ago I was awoken at the unearthly hour of 8.30am by a man who asked for me by name and rattled off a babble of incomprehensible French.

Cold calling is, I think, marginally worse here than in the UK. So, fairly politely considering it was still the middle of the night to me, I told him no thanks, go away, and hung up.

Almost immediately the phone rang again. I let it go to the answering machine and it was midday before I checked the message.

It was the same voice, but now decidedly irritable at having been hung up on.

Unfortunately for me it wasn't a persistent salesman trying to flog solar panels. It was the senior gendarme from the Beaumont HQ who was demanding my presence at the station by 9am the following day on an extremely important matter.

Being always guilty of something, even if only bad thoughts, I assumed the worst and presumed I was about to be deported.

So I phoned him back to be forearmed before any such appearance.

Curtly he informed me that a complaint of defamation had been laid against me to the prosecutor in Cahors in the neighbouring department of the Lot.

It concerned a story I had written for an English newspaper two months earlier.

I said I would need to speak to the company's lawyers before coming to the station and in any event would have to arrange for a French lawyer to be with me.

That wouldn't be possible, he informed me; lawyers were not permitted at a preliminary interview, and I would – please – be there sharp.

When I faced him in the small room next to the cells the following day, I now knew that, should he decide so, I could be held for 24 hours; no lawyer could see me in that time, I could not contact one and if the case went to court I could be fined and/or even face a prison sentence.

I was also advised, however, that if the line of questioning strayed into evidence or I was unhappy in the language; I could refuse to sign my "statement" and seek an official interpreter for a further meeting. Being a foreigner could, for once, be in my favour.

Unlike the UK, defamation in France is a criminal, not civil, offence. Unlike the UK, the reporter is on trial, not the newspaper in the first instance.

Although used to working within the strict French privacy laws governing the media, I was now chillingly aware of the far-reaching impact of official state-backed restrictions.

It was explained to me that the woman claimed I had held her up to public ridicule through the paper. Baffled, I asked how. He pulled from the file a translated version of the piece and pointed to the relevant paragraph.

It was a factual, physical description of the woman in a story in which she had been portrayed in a very positive light. Unfortunately it had been fed into Google Translate and what had been regurgitated was almost laughable. It was on this translation that the woman had filed her complaint and the police had acted upon.

I refused to continue without an official translation of the original piece plus a certified translator.

Fortunately, perhaps because here in Sleepy Hollows the complaint was unique, my high-powered Parisian lawyer was afterwards able to speak directly to the officer and get chapter and verse of the charge. Normally, he told me, he would have no such right or access and would only hear the full complaint in court.

Re-interviewed three weeks later with an interpreter to ensure no nuance was missed, no words used dangerously incorrectly, I eventually signed my statement. All would now be passed to magistrates in Cahors to determine if there was a case to answer.

So far I am in limbo, neither dismissed nor arraigned. Such things move slowly in France.

There are those, no doubt, who will think the French have got it right that a person can walk off the street into a police station and lay a, frankly vexatious, complaint against a journalist.

Only right that, as has happened on several occasions, a petulant president or PM can demand the head of an editor, who either opposes his party view or his morals, and get it on a silver platter.

Only right that politicians can force TV interviewers off screen for tough questioning, by slyly invoking future state subsidies to his bosses. (Subsidies that are also relied upon by French newspapers and naturally lead to political appointments at the top.)

Only right that parliament and the police, as in the French equivalents, can legally, directly interfere with the impartial gathering and publication of embarrassing facts. Fair enough.

The situation I'm in arises out of a trivial, tabloid story. It didn't change the course of history or bring down a government.

But there will be stories that do, and have done, both.

In France we'll never see them. We have not been allowed to do so thanks to a "daub" of legislation and a compliant press.

Thank God that couldn't happen in the UK.

cookfidelma@hotmail.com