This was a fine idea. An anglophone couple on the other side of our little town — about 150 yards away, that is — hosted a “reception” for New Year’s Eve.

A fine idea, and also handy on the safety/law-and-order front, in that most of the people who arrived walked less than five minutes to get to the party and to return home, and it’s hard to get in trouble on foot inside a small town in France on New Year’s Eve.

The event brought together citizens from half-a-dozen countries, including three native French … and ended with an anglophone/francophone discussion of the French pop idols who appeared on the local version of the “countdown” show.

With everyone involved in this being an adult of long standing, lots of canapes were produced and delivered, as well as the occasional bottle to contribute to the cause of jollity that began in front of a roaring fire.

Smoked salmon is a big thing, for a French New Year’s Eve, and three incarnations of it (including salmon biscuits, quite good) were available to snack on.

Two dozen oysters attracted attention, as did stuffed mushrooms, mince pies and, this being France, a quiche Lorraine.

Tchaikovsky was playing on a radio, coming to us live from somewhere in Europe, and that was a good soundtrack to the party since these were, remember, adults of long standing.

Conversational topics included comings and goings in the village, comings and goings of dogs and cats in the village, the French words for this or that “drizzle” (crachin), the identification of the anglophone who has the nicest French, as well as universal topics over the past six months — Brexit and the U.S. presidential election.

During a conversation in one corner I discovered that an Englishman I had not had the chance to talk to had twice spent time in Abu Dhabi, working in construction and liking it quite a bit.

(We spent more than six years in AD, through December of last year.)

Our Englishman sighed as he dreamily recalled the expat benefits packages of back in the day when the UAE was trying, successfully, to catch up to the 20th century.

His first stint there was in the early 1980s, when the UAE’s big cities had populations of maybe 100,000, and the road between Dubai and Abu Dhabi was a couple of lanes in each direction — compared to the 12-lane highway now connecting the country’s big-two cities.

As the clock ticked towards 11, a few people left for another party, and a few others made their way home, and the rest of us gathered around the TV to watch the countdown show.

The French have their version of the Dick Clark’s Rockin’ Eve music show with various guests dropping by between numbers. It is tacky and schmaltzy at the same time. You know the drill.

This was enlivened by one of our French neighbors, a guy well-versed in the French pop scene, who identified every past-their-prime “celebrity” who wandered through the set at Paris Disneyland.

The most famous/infamous was an unctuous character named Dany Boon (born Daniel Hamidou) who decided to anglicize his name to “Dany Boone” (like the American pioneer Daniel Boone) who was “the highest-paid actor in European film history” in 2008 after making an amusing (especially if you are French) movie about a low-rent area in the far north of France. In English, it was called: Welcome to the Sticks. In French, “Bienvenue Chez les Ch’tis”. That final word is pronounced “shtee” and is the French for “sticks”.

We were shamed for not knowing this monument to Gallic hilarity.

The French NYE show did not pay close attention to the clock, and didn’t get around to mentioning the time until only 10 seconds were left in 2016. That was toasted by the party-goers, and then it was back to the show.

Our French neighbor would deliver cryptic descriptions (“She used to be hot; I was in the same nightclub with her once”) and when we asked for more information he would call for one of the anglophones to do a wiki search.

It was fun, even if it doesn’t sound like it, and we lasted right through a lot of Champagne and two hours of French pop, which skews toward the wrinkled and ancient.

(Imagine Keith Richards, but there are dozens of them and they all sing in French.)

We were home at about 2:30 a.m., after walking home a French neighbor who had perhaps enjoyed a bit too much of the local vin, and decided our first NYE in the south of France had gone quite nicely.