As you enter a French town or village by road you'll be greeted with the standard rectangular highway sign telling you the name of the place.
But in some areas in rural France, these signs are upside down.
No, it's not a sudden mass failure of the screws holding the signs up - this is, in fact, a protest, and a long-running one at that.
Young farmers first began heading out into their local communities, armed with a screwdriver, to turn the welcome signs upside down in the latter part of 2023.
And in many communes local authorities decided to leave them like that as a mark of solidarity (or because they hadn't got round to turning them round) - the peak of the upside-down sign movement was in late 2023/early 2024, but you will still see villages proudly sporting an upside down sign.
The protests began in Tarn in south-west France before spreading through the country from the Mediterranean coast up to Normandy and Brittany in the north.
They are accompanied by the slogan 'Nous marchons sur la tête' (we're walking on our heads) to signal a world turned upside down or a policy that makes no sense.
The reason for these strange happenings? It's a protest, largely orchestrated by the farming union that represents young agriculture workers.
The Jeunes Agriculteurs protest turned out to be a precursor, the issues they were protesting about exploded into international prominence with the Europe-wide farmer protests in January 2024.
These used much more high-impact methods - roadblocks, huge convoys of tractors descending on cities and blockades of key sites around the country - but the complaints were the same, namely that excessive French and EU regulation means that farmers are finding it harder to make a living.
Other grievances relate to tax and diesel and payment of EU subsidies, while French farmers are also bitterly opposed to the EU's Mercosur treaty with South America which, they say, would flood the European market with cheap Brazilian and Argentinian beef.
The January and February protests were eventually called off after the government met with farmers unions and promised to meet at least some of the their demands, but the upside-down signs remained as a signal of the ongoing problems for farmers.
And the issue hasn't gone away - in fact farming unions have recently called for fresh protests because they say that despite government promises the help has not been forthcoming.
The protests are expected to step up again from Monday, November 18th.
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