Perhaps sport as an authentic expression of local culture.

As a distraction from the grim reality-check that 2022 has so far served up, I have been casting my mind back to recollect the best example of this that I have encountered.

What I came up with was this: July 1999 at a sports-field in Suze-la-Rousse, a few miles east of the mighty Rhône river and maybe 50 kilometres north of Avignon, home of the Papacy for much of the 14^th century.

This was where I had the immense good fortune to witness the French national truffling dog championship.

If you were looking for a symbol of French gastronomy, you would be spoiled for choice; but tuber melanosporum, the black truffle, would be right up there.

It has entered the culture to the extent that the French word for truffle - “truffe” - doubles up as slang for dogs’ shiny black noses.

An ability to sniff out the fragrant fungus in the regions where it occurs is a skill as utilitarian as rowing was 170 years ago when harpooned sperm whales provided much of the industrialising world’s illumination.

What then could be more natural than a competition to help develop such skills and reward the finest exponents?

First, let’s get one popular misconception out of the way - the pig is not the workmate of choice for truffle-hunters.

As I was told with great patience by one competitor: "At least 95 per cent of truffling animals are dogs.

"It is much easier - and more discreet - to put a dog in a car than a pig.

"Anyway, a pig finds truffles in order to eat them.

"A dog does it to please his master."

That was me told.

But how do you design a fair championship to identify the best practitioners, you might ask? And is it usual to find truffles growing under French sports-fields?

Well, no: what happened is that the field had been divided up into a series of taped-off five-metre squares. Six pieces of black truffle had been meticulously buried within each square; only the judges knew precisely where, and had maps to prove it.

It was the task of each competing canine to locate the buried fungus as quickly as possible.

It was the task of the dog’s human handler to stoop down and excavate the spot, extract the truffle (if truffle there was) and run over to present it to an official holding a bag at one corner of the squared-off area.

When you had retrieved all six, that was your time.

I might have struggled to work all this out for myself, but happily there was a wonderfully Gallic near two-hour lunch-break built into the schedule when many of the dramatis personae proved more than willing to talk an ignorant English visitor through some of the basics of their craft.

From this I also learnt that finding the truffles in competition is much harder than out in the countryside because they have only been in the ground for a short time.

"In the wild, a dog can smell them 50 to 100 metres away," says a competitor called Guy Meunier, whom I had watched set the fastest time of the day so far, in concert with a particularly talented spaniel.

Part of this pair’s edge seemed to come from the sturdy tool with which Meunier made his excavations; he confirmed that the tools were used more routinely for prising oysters off rocks in Charente-Maritime on the west coast.

From another competitor I learn that, while some are easier to train than others, just about any breed of dog can take up truffling: "There is even a chihuahua."

I am told in detail about the standard training methods used by one contestant. Besides truffles, this requires lumps of Gruyère cheese - "99 per cent of dogs like Gruyère."

As with other animal-related sports, the names of some competitors were elaborate, verging on poetic. Inès of the Quercy Mists was my favourite. Less evocatively Moulouk of the Dog Commandos was also in action under the bright sunshine of southern France.

And, as you find at the top level of every sport I can think of, there was a driven, intense air about most of the very best performers. Paulette Tedesco told me she had won the national championship 11 times with seven dogs.

If the Olympic world is the McDonald’s of sport, events like this are the cheerful, life-affirming family restaurants, with all their quirks and a preference for fresh, seasonal local ingredients.

With the monstrous cynicism at large in the world on open and violent display for all to see, this is the type of sport I need at the moment.