The regrets kicked in almost immediately. Stein struck the deal in the old-school publishing way: over a long, alcoholic lunch with Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, the then managing director of Hamish Hamilton, who offered an advance of £5,000. To my enormous surprise and relief, he wrote back saying that if I could do another 250 pages like the letter, he might be able to find a publisher.' Eventually I sent Abner a long letter, largely inspired by guilt, trying to explain why I hadn't even started the novel, listing some of the distractions. 'And so time went by – three months, six months – without a word being committed to paper. The daily dose of education I was receiving at the hands of the plumber, the farmer next door, the mushroom hunter and the lady with the frustrated donkey was infinitely more fascinating than anything I could invent. 'But there was a problem: I found myself completely distracted – much more taken up with the curiosities of life in Provence than with getting down to work on the novel.

'When we first moved to France I had the intention of writing a novel and had shared this great ambition with my agent, Abner Stein,' says Mayle. If Mayle had had his way, the description of A Year in Provence as fiction would have been spot on. And still they keep on coming only this year Selina Scott wrote a memoir of her life in Mallorca and John Humphrys hijacked his son's housebuilding project in Greece.

Unintentionally, Mayle had created a new travel genre and spawned a generation of imitators, a couple of whom – Chris Stewart and Frances Mayes – sold almost as well. After a slowish start, A Year in Provence has gone on to sell more than 1m copies in the UK and 6m around the world in the last 20 years, making it one of the most successful travel books of all time and inspiring thousands of Brits to leave Blighty in search of a warmer, gentler life. The reading public saw it rather differently.

To them, A Year in Provence was just aspirational lifestyle pulp for the middle-classes dreaming of a second home – the undemanding story of a fiftysomething couple and their two dogs moving to the South of France and their mildly amusing run-ins with lazy builders, a clarinet-playing plumber, tax-dodging lawyers, outlaw truffle hunters and the Mistral as they do up a derelict farmhouse.

A year in provence by peter mayle