Every year they arrive for the summer, or at least part of it, driving their 4x4s and large estate cars from south-east England's towns and cities.

Children or grandchildren are stuffed in the back along with the iPads, the travel sweets and the sickness bags vital for the long drive down to the house in France. Six or eight sweaty, occasionally fractious, hours is nothing with the lure of the second home nestled in the vale, ready to be awakened for a time before falling back into winter neglect.

Those of us who live here have a curious relationship with the part-time expats. I'm sure a bit of it is envy, knowing they can pack up and return to another, more vibrant life, enjoying the best of both worlds without dealing with the daily frustrations of French living.

Sometimes we really resent them, particularly when they barge around the supermarkets or clog up restaurants shouting things like: "Darling? Darling? Make sure it's the fresh milk not that awful long-life stuff." Or: "Sweetheart, SWEETHEART - please don't race Timmy up the aisles, you're hurting Mummy's head again." Or: "For heaven's sake, George, all I asked was that you follow me with the trolley. Is that really too much to ask? Is it?" Everyone pauses to watch this rollicking procession through Le Clerc or Intermarche.

Their trolleys quickly fill with goose gizzards, duck hearts, knobbly hard sausages from the hillbilly centres of the country, cheeses of every texture and pungency brought lovingly up to noses and inhaled through the impermeable plastic.

"Oh my God - just too, too divine. George, George, get some of that paysan bread with the seeds will you? Oh, and the pâté, the one with the olives and ceps. What? No, no … olives, mushrooms. Forget it, just forget it. I'll just find it myself, same as I always have to do." Much sighing and muttering usually follows.

In the restaurants we know that raised voices and loud laughter are painful to the French. It's as much a no-no as blowing your nose in your napkin or goosing the waitress is to us. But in their family hives of mutual satisfaction, such strictures or manners do not penetrate.

The voices soar over the other diners discussing the coming days' activities. Barbecues with the Taylors, the Bentleys, the this, the that. Trips are planned to favourite villages and markets; leaflets consulted for the "sweet" rustic fetes where George can play petanque with Timmy.

And of course there is the annual wine stock-up from the local vineyard.

"Such intensity. Such depth," they explain earnestly to friends who've joined them for a few days. "It really, really helps when you know the maker. Jean-Luc is a master, a master. His face when we arrive! He totally appreciates our appreciation.

"Mind you, he can be a touch expensive. But it's worth it. It'd cost four times as much in London." Strange, that, seeing as I often cross their paths again in Lidl.

Then there are the ones who play at being French once a year. Most of us gave up on that after the first year.

A friend was recently invited to a lunch party via a proper engraved invitation … in French. "It was lunch in the garden - all second-home people, bar us - but there was an actual menu in French of all French things.

"The men were in their pressed shorts, the women in little tea dresses, all swanning around in straw hats and trailing scarves. Every few words they'd drop in a French word which was hilarious as few of them speak French and rely on pointing and shouting in the shops.

"But they genuinely believe that for one month a year they're living la vie Francaise. In fact, that they're really French. Upper-crust French, of course.

"It would almost be cruel to disabuse them and tell them we're usually inside watching Sky with beans on toast on our laps, not walnut-dribbled homemade rillettes."

The market cafes at the height of summer are another place they like to hang out to meet other swallows with shrieks of delight on spotting a familiar pear shape flip-flopping over the cobbles. Ghastly tales of the pool man who failed to show and the gardener who destroyed the precious mulberry in their absence are told and retold with every new addition to the cup-strewn table.

Huddled in a corner of "their" cafe are the expats who can no longer afford a gardener, never mind a bloody pool man, and fling glares at these intruders who don't acknowledge them anyway. Their bramble-scratched arms tell of constant battles with nature that encroaches in fairy footsteps the second a back is turned.

Apero invitations are flung out as they pile back into the big cars clutching vastly overpriced melons and other fruits marked up for their arrival, marked down the second they pack up for home.

Am I being cruel? Of course. There are loads of nice, quiet, easily assimilated second-homers but there's no joy in poking fun at them, is there? Anyway, they've all gone now. The houses are barred and shuttered, the gates padlocked.

I swear the houses almost sigh as their owners drive out of sight.

Another summer over.