I am more equivocal about le zingueur - technically a zinc worker, more exactly a roofer. (I should add I ignored l’ébéniste, never having needed a hand-carved witch-doctor’s mask in African hardwood.) Drefféac’s zingueur, who had a comical surname which I’m damned if I can remember, was extremely hard to find. Desperate I knocked on his door just as he was about to lunch, a solecism few Brits unfamiliar with France would comprehend.
Monsieur, he shrugged, fighting to contain himself, le téléphone. But I didn’t have a French landline and this pre-dated mobiles. I wasn’t an enthusiast before and seeing his lunch-table was set with something red poured into chunky Cristal d’Arques glasses which inhibit wine appreciation put me off even more.
For me zingueur resonates with tzigane (gypsy) and M. Zincman might have had nomadic blood. His thick curly hair looked like a football into which his head had been partially inserted. His dangling arms and simian gait equipped him well for scrambling up ladders. Although he'd done other jobs for me he refused to suggest a solution to a leaky roof over the lean-to section of the house (see pic). Several years after we sold I stopped to view the house’s exterior noting the lean-to section had a new roof. The Irish buyer had had no French and it’s possible the roof represented M. Zincman’s revenge for that interrupted lunch.
