After a cabinet meeting yesterday the papers are claiming that the rules for post-lockdown France are becoming clear. I’m glad they think so, the government’s announcements don’t seem particularly earth-shattering to me.

Here are the main decisions:

• Anyone arriving in the country will be placed in quarantine, which can’t be longer than 30 days. By the way, the French quaintly call 14 days’ quarantine a “quatorzaine”, since they speak what is essentially a dialect of Latin and quarantaine still shows its origins as a period of 40 days, apparently the time Venetians obliged plague-infested ships to remain isolated if they arrived on their shores;
• Infected people will be expected to isolate themselves and their households, either at home or in hotels set aside for that purpose, but this will not be legally enforced;
• Tracing the infected and those they have been in contact with will take place but not via the controversial StopCovid app. It will be done by doctors and other health professionals and there will be regional and national data banks.
• Various quasi-police officers, such as security officers on public transport, will have the power to stop and check people. We won’t have to fill in forms to leave home, so they won’t have those to look at, but their duties will probably include making people wear masks on public transport, enforcing safety precautions in shops and stopping people stray more than 100km from their homes.

It is still unclear to me what the difference between red (high infection), orange (medium infection) and green (virus-free) zones will be.

The announcements are accompanied with appeals not to drop our guard. But this seems to be happening already.

There is more traffic on the roads than there were a couple of weeks ago, there are more cars parked on Champigny’s Place Lénine, where the Chinese greengrocers has reopened and the bookshop is taking orders to be collected two afternoons a week, and my neighbours are coming out of their homes to sweep in front of their front doors and chat.

Italy has reported a rise in deaths, ahead of its phased ending of strict lockdown. Those people must have caught the virus a week or two ago but there does appear to have been a relaxation of precautions there as deconfinement approached.

The Algerian Kabyle singer Idir has died.  I saw him perform with French singer Maxime Le Forestier in the grounds of the Palais Royal one Fête de la musique. They changed the French song Paris s’éveille into Tizi Ouzou s’éveille, in honour of the main town in Kabylie.

Idir’s song Avava Inouva heralded a renaissance of Kabyle culture, my friend Omar Bouraba comments on Facebook. “It gave us back pride and colours and we needed that.

“I remember as a kid when the song arrived on our old radios, for my family a Grundig,” he goes on. “We often subscribed to buy batteries to listed to Idir. We didn’t have electricity.

“Later, as an immigrant, I learnt how precious his songs were to help bear the absence and how easy it was to make connections, to exchange with other cultures thanks to Idir’s songs.”

Desperate for a haircut after lockdown? Try this hairdresser, which appears to be somewhere in French-speaking Africa.

The advertising slogan is “Come inside ugly, leave pretty.” Admit you’re tempted.

The photo appeared on a rather niche Facebook page devoted to French shopfronts 1950-75. Well, I like that sort of thing.

Paris’s rue de Rivoli will be closed to private cars as part of the city council’s fight against pollution.

Here’s how it looked in 1863, before the invention of the infernal internal combustion engine. I don’t think they plan to bring back the horse-drawn vehicle.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 24,760, 166 in the past 24 hours. 25,827 people are in hospital, down 60 in a day, with 3,827 in intensive care, down 51. 50,562 people have been discharged from hospital, 350 of them yesterday.