SITTING in the sun on the sea wall at Cancale in northern Brittany, my 20-year-old daughter Katy was finally persuaded to eat her first oyster. She asked for another.

We had bought a dozen - for less than the price of a pint across the Channel - from a stall overlooking the bay. Accompanied by bread still warm from the bakery and washed down with wine at £1 a litre, life doesn't get much better.

Cancale is to oysters what Bordeaux is to wine, with 400 hectares of oyster beds, serviced by an army of rusty tractors, revealed by the retreating tide.

There's a museum dedicated to the heavenly mollusc, and a fountain showing ladies in period dress holding up baskets of the beauties, as if offering them to the Lord.

As is the case everywhere in France, food is not so much an obsession as a constant delight. The English eat to live - the French live to eat. And in Brittany, the sea is the source of much of that pleasure.

I counted more than 40 bars and restaurants along the few hundred yards of seafront at Cancale.

On that Saturday lunchtime, they were full of families devouring oysters, slurping delicious fish soup with a special garlic mayonnaise, cracking open crabs, lobsters and crayfish, and wolfing down the plump orange mussels cultivated a few miles down the coast near Mount St Michel. Our preparation for feasting had begun on the overnight crossing from Portsmouth to the old walled city of St Malo. If you have not been on a channel ferry for a few years, you are in for a pleasant surprise.

The service provided by Brittany Ferries is more like the atmosphere on a cruise, with a classy restaurant, a variety of bars, live entertainment, and a cinema.

On arrival, we had diverted to Cancale on our way to the gite which had been provided for us a few miles inland near the village of Miniac Morvan.

Home for the week was half a converted farmhouse with a sweeping gravel drive, its own boules pitch and a cider orchard, heavy with bunches of mistletoe.

It was a "Gite Rural", recommended for its peace and quiet; indeed, the tranquillity was so intense you felt you could bottle it.

This was real rural France; rolling countryside with fat cattle and acres of cauliflowers; gardens full of tomatoes the size of cricket balls; and delightful stone-built villages, each with its weekly market and sad, pristine memorial to the dead of two world wars.

In our small village alone, more than 100 "enfants de Miniac Morvan" had marched off to the trenches in 1914 never to return.

When I first went to Brittany in the late fifties, it was still a land of widows in black.

Back then, France was a very foreign country indeed to an eight-year-old boy, who had travelled from an England that had never heard of croissants or garlic, yoghurt or camembert.

An England where the only place to buy olive oil was the chemist - and that was for dissolving ear wax. An England where a favourite treat was tinned tomato soup.

Now, whatever the crazed wing of the Tory party says, we are all Europeans, and load up our weekly supermarket trolleys with such Continental delights without a second thought. But a trip to France, though less of a culture shock these days, is still a joy.

The rhythm of life is different and continues much as it always has done, revolving, of course, around food. The roads are still empty between midday and 2pm, and the care of the inner man and woman is a still the vital topic of the day.

I popped into the village caf one evening for a pastis to find the landlord skinning an eel on the bar. He had just caught it in the local estuary and was surrounded by customers earnestly advising him on the best way to serve up the beast. In Brittany, the sea is never far way.

This is a holiday for adults, or parents with small children who are happy to spend all day playing on the beach in the rocky coves while mum and dad enjoy picnics bought from the market that morning, read, doze and let the tensions of life slip away.

It is not really recommended for bored Kevin the Teenagers, or for non-fish-eating vegetarians who hope to dine out a lot.

The rural French are not hostile to veggies, they just find them baffling - rather as one might regard a man who vowed to spend the whole of his life standing on one leg.

Before we knew it, the time had come to load up the boot with wine and jars of fish soup and head back to Blighty.

But, if we hurried, we could just squeeze in a diversion on our way to St Malo - for a final tray of oysters.