Risk of Collapse…..

Now this photo challenge grabbed me straight away: Sara Rosso invited photographers to share a picture of a sign, and explain why they used it.

I knew what picture would be just the ticket! This sign stopped me dead in my tracks as I swung around the corner of path winding through a botanical garden on the Côte d’Azur last summer. Ten feet further away on the right of the picture is a cliff overhanging the Med.

The sign post translates into English as follows: “Risk of collapse”. I couldn’t work out whether a sadistic garden employee had it deliberately planted it skew-whiff to scare off visitors, or whether the sign had been irresistibly drawn towards the cliff edge, fatally drawn by the death-threat written on its forehead……..

Needless to say, I didn’t hang about. But first I took the picture of the first inanimate object that unambiguously showed how I often feel …… as a working mother 😀

 

Flower Power

Your humble scribe likes flowers and plants – as long as it’s on someone else’s patch. So this morning I was thrilled by an unexpected virtual wander around blogger Kathryn’s beautiful garden on her great blog Vastly Curious, which you can find here. The wisteria blooming out of the screen was so real that it would have any asthmatic reaching out for their inhaler. I was instantly reminded of my love-hate relationship with plants: they love to hate me.

I follow two blogs that talk about plants and flowers in the hope of discovering where I went wrong. Letters and Leaves has a twin passion for plants and literature. She ties her spade and rake to her bike, Macgyver-style, before cycling off with her book to her vegetable plot. I take my horticultural hat off to her, because she not only manages to make things grow, but actually eats what she produces.  I also have a soft spot for “A north east ohio garden”, where John Hric writes with enthusiasm about his day lilies – and the adventure of crossing them to create new flowers. His impatience to see what results from cross-breeding trials is catching, and I am intrigued by the tender way he refers to the “parents” and “grandparents” of each new “baby” he presents.

But put me in charge of John’s garden, and it would be transformed from a lush Garden of Eden to a post-apocalyptic wasteland faster than you can say “Alan Titchmarsh”. I freely admit to being the Grim Reaper of the vegetal vortex. The green finger gene deftly sidestepped me on its way through our family tree. In the same way that my mother just has to look at a plant for it to instantly transform the kitchen window sill into a dense stretch of Amazonian forest, a simple glance from MM is enough to make anything green keel over and die. Plants and I have an unspoken mutual agreement by which anything that isn’t already in the vegetable tray commits herbal hara-kiri within a month of meeting me.

“I hoe, I hoe, it’s off to compost you go…” MM’s alternative gardening version of the seven dwarves’ chart buster (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My main problem with plants is that they are at our mercy for everything. The thing that worries me the most is that the damned things have a real communication problem. We are told that we should talk to them, but how do they get through to us? They wilt. Plants wilt to communicate every single need across a spectrum going from water to sun through soil, fertilizer, air, company, and warding off evil spirits. Now, If plants could just talk, they’d have a deal. After all, if my kids had been born with leaves instead of mouths, they would be no more than fond memories in the steaming compost heap of my mind by now. (This also explains why I did not name my daughter “Petunia” or “Daisy”; I probably would have watered her to death before her first birthday.)

So we can safely conclude that on the intelligent gift idea scale, giving MM a plant ranks 0/10. As far as good ideas go, it is on a par with asking Myra Hindley around to babysit, accepting Eva Longoria’s kind offer to drop your husband off at the hotel, or temporarily entrusting your piggy bank to Bernie Madoff. Yet despite my gold medal-winning inaptitude to take care of anything green, a strange family rite occurs in this house once a year. Every spring it is the same scenario: 1. PF buys plants.  2. PF charmingly “hides” plants beside the washing line at the bottom of the garden. 3. Children give MM the plants as Mother’s Day offerings. 4. MM digs holes in the garden for them to die in. (That sentence was ambiguous: I am of course referring to the plants and not my children).

Clementine the Mandarine, sole long-term survivor of MM’s fruit boot camp. Note Paddington Bear-style instructions label around neck.

“Clementine” the Mandarine is the only long-term surviving contestant in the “who will survive MM” contest – Bernard the Bougainvillea quickly declined into an irreversible coma last year, and went to blossom in the floral fields of horticultural heaven not long after I’d noticed the instructions label hanging forlornly around his withered neck. As I entrusted his mummified remains to the depths of the garden muttering a perfunctory “leaves to humus, dirt to dirt” under my breath, I was elected “bad plant mum of the year” for the umpteenth year running, and informed that next year I wouldn’t be getting any more.

I lived in hope for an entire year that the plants would be replaced by their weight in chocolate, but this year PF set off undeterred once again for the local plant store, where he  gravely elected this year’s unfortunate candidates for MM’s horticultural version of Death Row. He just can’t help himself. You can give the man ten out of ten for determination: Optimism is my husband’s middle name.

Sunday lunchtime thus found MM staring out from behind the floral equivalent of the great wall of China at her beaming offspring. I was relieved to see that the choice of plants has finally moved away from the usual frail and fragile exotica demanding filtered holy water, daily meditation and feng shui-flavoured compost spiked with tropical fruit bat droppings. This year’s candidates are more resistant and realistic plants like dahlias, flowering sage and strawberries. If these don’t survive, I’ll no doubt be getting Triffids next year. I duly thanked my offspring, and went to the garden to dig the graves of my next victims. Here is the macabre scene for Act Two of MM’s tragic Mother’s Day impromptu plant play: “The Death of the Strawberry Sisters”.

The future tombstone of the Strawberry Sisters. I shall play “Strawberry Fields Forever” at their funeral.

I crouched down on the ground at sunset and levelled with my new recruits to outline their future in MM’s merciless berry boot camp. “The deal is simple: I give you water. You don’t wilt, and you give me strawberries. Any desiderata must be spelled out in stones at your side in simple code – “W” for Water, “S” for Sun, “F” for fertiliser. Last year’s winners were called the Cocktail Commando – a tough tomato trio. They were Solanum Supermen; top-notch tomatoes who followed the vegetable plot to the letter. Now it’s over to you, Strawberry Sisters. I don’t want wilting wallflowers, I want girl power. Berry nice, girls, over to you.”

They didn’t reply. I’m feeling anxious. I’m off to have a word with those weeds now – I can swear I heard them whispering on the sidelines……

MM needs YOU!

Yes, I’m talking to you!(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

MM has entered a writing competition! My epistolary efforts and those of 18 other international bloggers were published today, and the overall winner will be announced on Friday. The theme is “Working Abroad”. It has been treated to force ten MM mental machinery, and turned into a description of the French working schedule (or lack thereof) during the month of May.

To read it, click on the link below which will take you to my entry in the most recent Expat’s Blog Writing Contest, called “Maytime Mayhem: The eye of the French working cyclone”.

If you enjoy what you read, please don’t hesitate to leave your comment directly after the text on the same page – comments are taken into consideration to choose the winning entries. Also feel free to share via Twitter and/or Facebook/ carrier pigeon if the fancy takes you. I will, of course, love you all forever and ever, whether or not you choose to read or comment 😀

The Expats blog site is a fabulous platform for expat bloggers all over the world; why not sign your blog up there too?

Link to my competition entry here:

http://www.expatsblog.com/contests/472/maytime-mayhem-eye-of-french-working-cyclone

Have a good read! MM xx

Lavatorial Lingo: The story of a woman who flipped her lid.

I flipped my lid about the family bathroom last night, and any hope for serious blogging today has gone down the pan, for lack of a better term. So today, dear readers, for your eyes only, here is the low-down on MM’s pet peeve. Get yourself a coffee now – this text started out as a small dose of tongue-in-cheek bog breviloquence, then grew into an extended version of verbal diarrhoea. Such is life when one blogs about bogs.

The evening had started off well. I had gone to bed and read a couple of chapters of an old novel from my student days, complete with the Purple Ronnie bookmark it contained back in 1988. It kind of sets the tone for this post.

My super Purple Ronnie Bottom Burp poem bookmark. An example of the sweetness and light typical of MM in her student days.

I put down the book, switched off the light and carefully laid my sinus-blocked head on the pillow. My gentle slide through Aunty Biotic’s drug-enhanced world into the arms of Morpheus was rudely interrupted by the audible mutterings of my night-time enemy, the evil “Mr B”. In the multiparous mother’s dictionary, “B” is for “Bladder”. Like the ferocious nocturnal predator known as “handus mannus” (found under the common name “the hand” in the female version of the dictionary), a bladder is, of course, masculine, like other things that bother women when they are dropping off to sleep. I ignored him. He pulled hard on the chain and rang a familiar bell in my brain, making me feel annoyingly like a servile Jeeves in a PG Wodehouse bad-bladder-boss-meets-brain scenario. And off we went for another of our futile little debates, that generally run as follows:

Mr B: “Hey! MM! You awake?”

Me: “No”.

Mr B: “You just answered. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, you are awake. I need to go.”

Me: “Bog off. The legs clocked off five minutes ago, and the brain shut down for the night two hours ago. Over and out.”

Mr B: “That’s tough, because I need to go, and I won’t let you sleep till it’s done”.

Me: “Liar. You went ten minutes ago. Put a plug in it, walnut”.

Mr B: ” Wake up and smell the coffee, honey; your pelvic floor has subsided faster than a home-made soufflé. Does 11kgs of babies mean anything to you? Girl, it’s been Armageddon down here since June 2002. And you’re the one who chose Bagels instead of Kegels after hurricane Rugby-boy blew through, remember? Wanna go.”

I heaved myself out of bed, and fumbled down the corridor in the dark – I never switch the lights on, because it wakes me up again and by the time I start dropping off, Mr B starts gushing forth with his demands again. So I dropped myself sighing on to what I thought was a toilet seat in the dark.. and fell an inch further on to cold china.

Brr, yuck, yuck. Bog boot camp. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There is no need to be Einstein to work out which gender had visited the loo before me. I have already ranted about this bog bugbear and other household task issues in this post. So here’s the deal, guys: a toilet has a seat. This rather charming definition of the word “seat” could help you understand what this strange contraption is used for: “something designed to support a person in a sitting position, as a chair, bench, or pew; a place on or in which one sits”. This dictionary definition got me thinking: I do like the idea of a pew. I quite fancy a whole new take on lavatorial lingo: meet the pee pew. Or what about a buttock bench, stool stall, poop parlour, cheek chair, or flatulence throne? The possibilities are endless.

I digress. Whatever you choose to call it, a seat is for sitting on. It is not much use to anyone if it is folded up at right angles in a vertical position. Particularly in the dark. Boys, if we girls put the sofa upside down every evening just before you appeared with your beer and the tv remote, you’d howl. So put yourselves in our position and imagine jarring your previously warmed, Mr Men pyjama-unwrapped behind on cold china and not the gentle NASA-style docking you had expected with a room-temperature plastic seat. Then realise as your stomach flops over with disgust that the person before you had probably peed from a respectable height whilst inspecting his shoes or contemplating the ceiling. Sorry guys, but here you have proof of the pud: you cannot do several things at once.

Sitting in the dark, I wondered whether James Bond aimed as precisely once he was behind the toilet door. As special force material rippling with virile instinct and the eye of the tiger, do the super heroes of the male urinary universe whistle and stare gormlessly at the ceiling as they point Percy at the porcelain? Or do they delect in the thrills and spills of dropping a ball of toilet paper in the pan and aiming at their unsuspecting victim with sniper precision for toilet time target practice? (Are soldier household toilets easier to clean than their civilian counterparts? Answers on a postcard, please, bloggers.)

Tim’s wife gives the other side of the story in Closer magazine: “He may have been a sharp shooter on the field, but certainly not in the bathroom.” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What I can see from my resident brood of men is that a toilet seat is only used when they have longer-lasting duties to attend to (in mother talk, we’d crudely comment that for some dads, it’s the only occasion on which they can claim that they have dropped the kids off at the pool). We always know when you have been there, because the seat is strangely…. down. It is also horribly warm, and the floor is littered with uninteresting reading material such as the DIY shop catalogue or “A guide to snakes”, thus giving away the identity of the person who has – once again – forgotten to walk the toilet brush whilst they were there.

I was mistaken to think that this would all pan out eventually. I have tried to go with the flow, rather than flushing with rage at the idea that you are deliberately yanking my chain. You have brushed off my pleas, guys, even if I do admit that you grudgingly tried to pander to my wishes a few times. But your efforts were sadly no more than flashes in the pan.

So I will no longer keep a lid on my frustration. I have decided on action: a shit, oops, sit-in. Mr B will be delighted to learn that he and I will be occupying the pee pew all day tomorrow in a “pee-ceful” protest against the perils of the open loo seat. I will take my book and my Purple Ronnie page marker with me. And even if the Bog Brigade sniff me out, I won’t be out until tomorrow evening, when I’ve finished my book and got the protest badge of the loo seat imprinted on my buttocks.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Escape

My escape this week is into painkillers and antibiotics. The pictures I have chosen for the Weekly Photo Challenge on the same theme relate the escape theme viewed in different ways…. Hope you enjoy them.

Escape together.

Dream of escaping into the awaiting horizon.

Childhood escape.

Team escape.

Escape reality.

Escape to victory (face blurred to respect French law).

Sinusitis and Shower Power.

I am feeling sorry for myself. True MM tradition dictates that whatever can go wrong will invariably do so at the wrong time, and my health is no exception to the rule: bugs equipped with their equivalent of blaring music, ice boxes, barbecues and gazebos moved stealthily into their comfy new quarters in my sinuses on Sunday evening and have been partying there ever since. It is a bank holiday weekend: nuff said. MM has a head like a lead balloon. Any tilting movement makes me feel like it is going to fall off and crash to the ground, before rolling along like Marie-Antoinette’s bonce on her worst day ever on the Place de la Revolution.

Having sinusitis is a little like having a massive hangover, but without having had the pleasure of getting drunk first.  Let’s just say that my head has been hurting for the last 24 hours. It is sitting on my shoulders, a huge, heavy bowling ball of throbbing pain. My eyes are standing out on sticks like wobbly martian antennae. My nose feels like it is auditioning for a role in Cyrano de Bergerac, and I could swear that my upper teeth are making a bid for freedom, like a herd of enamel horses trying to escape from their reinforced slime enclosure as an out-of tune rendition of Black Beauty is played in the background. I would love to be able to let off some of the pressure in my plumbing, but the taps are welded shut. As my kids would say, “Snot fair”. Quite literally.

Yet this morning, in true MM mode, I was determined not to let my day be wrecked by the lousy bunch of bacteria whooping it up non-stop within my facial piping. I almost imagine them as cute little one-eyed midgets in stripey PJ’s; the evil, bacterial side-kicks of Ken Dodd’s diddy men. Giggling evilly, they are clanging on my twisting facial tubes with miniature, bacteria-sized spanners, and bouncing their offspring up and down on my nerve endings, booting at the inflamed tissue with their bovver boot-clad feet. (I hasten to add at this point that I have only taken aspirin. Honest.)

A shower is a great way to wake up and get your ideas into synch. I shuffled into the bathroom for a shower, determined to make the most out of the beautiful, sunny day that had greeted my puffy eyes when I opened the shutters. I would emerge a new woman: beautiful, germ-ridden and ready for a day in that beautiful sunlight.

Some people sing in the shower, and some people scrape the dead skin off their feet with their finger nails. (Honestly. I saw someone doing this in a public swimming pool, and I didn’t know whether I wanted to drown him or run.) Others dream of their Prince or Princess Charming, winning the pools, writing a block-bluster or walking into the garage to find that someone else has cleaned it up and neatly organised the winter shoes into labelled boxes. (All the aforementioned is true for me – except for the Prince Charming, because I locked him up in the tower years ago and have been exploiting him for attention, beer and chocolate ever since.)

I bet that Winston Churchill made up his best speeches under the shower. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I give myself pep talks in the shower – I coach myself up for my day. Imagine the Rocky equivalent of motherhood with less body hair than Sly Stallone, armed with a bottle of shower gel rather than a machine gun and sporting flabby sidecars on her hips instead of muscle on her arms.

I review everything I need to get ironed out, organised, stopped, started and otherwise dealt with, and for the time that I am under that generous stream of hot water, anything and everything is possible. Life is easy, peasy, lemon squeezy. I am invincible under that shower head, armed with my optimism, my supermarket razor and Bigfoot’s shaving foam. I have even discovered the parallel between washing your hair in the shower and putting on weight. Haven’t you?  It’s simple. It’s clearly mentioned on the bottle that the shampoo gives you “extra body”. It cannot be a coincidence – after years of the stuff running down my body on its way to the plug hole, it has worked. My rear end and thighs have slowly progressed to plumper proportions. Think about it, and wash your hair in the sink next time. Or go for the stuff that says it straightens hair instead – the worst that can happen is to end up with a butt flatter than Jane Birkin’s chest.

MM scratched her head. How could that volume boosting shampoo not only have increased hair growth, but also weight gain? (Photo credit: Wikipedia) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Anyway. I digress. Back to our sheep, as they say in France. The hot water and I listed all the important and not so important things I would accomplish today. MM in the shower is an unstoppable force who could solve the Isreali-Palestinian conflict with no more than a deftly aimed spurt of shampoo and a lick of supermarket conditioner as the bath toys look on in admiration. Mountains and mole hills were thus put back in their respective places, and the ruffles of life were smoothed away by the beating warm water. A timetable was drawn up for MM’s busy day. Translations, bills, shopping, kids, cars, cleaning…. Although my head remained fuzzy, the day’s horizon cleared in synch with the diminishing velcro on my shins. Things were looking up. The day was promising.

Then someone knocked on the door. The razor slipped. Our mater familias par excellence bent her head to stem the bleeding on her shin, and swore as the blocked piping complained and her head hurt. I looked through puffy eyes out of the window at the sunny weather outside. Hell, things could be worse…..  This could at least provide a strange and pointless post for my blog. My readers now know that I wash on a regular basis….. pass the aspirin.

Life without literacy.

Reading and writing have always been as essential to me as love, laughter, oxygen and food. It is part and parcel of everyday life; I cannot imagine living without this ability. Life would be hell.

So when I discovered that a friend was illiterate, my stomach overturned. I asked her how she managed. Imagine a world where you have no idea what is written on the paper that you pull out of that envelope. On that packet. How can you live without this essential tool for communication?

My hedgehog book sits beside my bed. A meeting between a child and a novel creates beautiful things.

The answer is dependence. That terrible state I never want to be in is her everyday situation. Her husband reads the notes from school to her, and her daughter reads the homework instructions out loud so that she can understand. Her daughter is sweet, understanding and fun. Like her mum. She reads for her mum. Her mother trusts her to tell her the truth. A delicate equation of trust and dependency between a mother and daughter that will continue for as long as they need each other, in a world where a child is the eyes of her parent, reading the news before passing it on. When she grows older, will she filter out the bad stuff, like we do as parents for our children before they know how to read? The necessary role reversal that had occurred so naturally shocked me.

But there is no firewall, nothing and no one to protect her if one day those helping hands suddenly disappeared. This dependence shocks me; how can illiteracy still exist in this day and age? The clock is ticking, and nothing has changed. Time that could be used to make things better is running through the hourglass.

I tried to motivate her. A simultaneous desire to hug her and shake her out of her lethargy and into action. Sign up for classes. You’re so young. Be independent. Rely on yourself. Be proud. Do it. Prove to yourself that you love yourself, and if you can’t do it for yourself, do it for the sake of your daughter. Please. Don’t rely on others for something so essential. Respect yourself. React. In this day and age, it is wrong to accept this kind of situation as a fatality.

I have suddenly realised that like so many other things in life, like love, health and happiness, things that I had always considered a basic staple of life are a privilege. That although we grew up in the same world, at the same time, she didn’t get the same chances as me. I have taken a real slap on the face. I am thankful for having parents who refused to let me let go, who cocooned me in a world full of books, literacy, library visits, who encouraged me and pushed me to never be dependent on anyone else. Education is a right. But it is also a privilege.

Unconventional

I couldn’t resist this WordPress challenge. Describe unconventional love, and post a picture of something unconventional? Deal!

I’m a pretty unconventional person all round; many would argue that I am one can short of a six pack. In any case, my acute case of Peter Pan Syndrome (my term for never, ever wanting to grow up) makes life much more fun for a pretend grown-up (shhh, it’s our secret).

Typical Playmobil scenario when I play with Little My. Copyright Multifarious meanderings.

My most unconventional love is therefore for playing. Playing hard, playing fast, and above all, playing silly buggers (as my wonderful Mancunian Grandmother used to say). I love playing Playmobils with my daughter, who sometimes rolls her eyes and tells me to grow up. But I won’t. Read more about the dark side of Playmobilia here.

My family is equally loopy: put them on a beach on Christmas Eve (the best time ever to flee conventions and play in the sand), and they’ll immediately find the only waylaid soldier’s helmet on the entire French coastline and combine it with a dustbin support on the beach to do something totally…. unconventional. I love it, and I love them.

Rugbyboy illustrating the “unconventional” family gene on a beach on Christmas Eve.

Shopping Sociology with Earth Daddy and the Dinkies.

It is common procedure to open the fridge within my house within two days of raiding the the supermarket and discover that it is barer than John Malkovich’s scalp. Feed a teenager the entire contents of the cupboard, and within two hours he will be rubbing round your legs like a famished tomcat, wailing that he is starving. Buy him a packet of cereal and it disappears within two days. Teenagers appear to believe in the Kellogg’s equivalent of the magic porridge pot: why is the box incapable of renewing its own contents?

That’s how I found myself wheeling my trolley around Intermarché for the umpteenth time yesterday. As usual, I had the one with the squeaky wheel. As usual, I had forgotten my list on the kitchen table. And as usual, all my favourite categories of shopper were there.

An ideal shopping trolley for MM’s family (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Show me the contents of your trolley, and I’ll tell you who you are. Here are a few of the species I met:

Earth Daddy. Earth Daddy is married to my nemesis, Wonder Woman, who is a regular victim of my ire and bad faith on this blog. As she spends her free time at Primary school meetings in the evening, making smarmy little asides to ensure everyone knows that she is on first name terms with the teacher, Earth Daddy does the shopping with his children. He trips enthusiastically down the aisles in his designer cotton clothes, filling his trolley with whole grains, granary bread, Ryvita and Scandinavian yoghurt that has never seen a pesticide, but has made a generous contribution to the hole in the ozone layer after travelling to the South of France by plane and truck. An appropriately sleeping baby is bandaged tastefully to his chest with so much naturally dyed swathing that he looks disturbingly like a child-friendly remake of “The Mummy”.

Baby’s big sister generally has a very tasteful name like Clementine or Prune. (Classy kids in France are apparently named after fruit. Maybe Gwyneth Paltrow is actually French; she called her kid Apple.) Clementine/Prune/Banana’s education doesn’t stop when they shop, as Earth Daddy believes in taking every opportunity to brainwash his child inform Clementine about the best possible choices in life. So he stopped at the chocolate shelf as Clementine enthusiastically pointed to a well-known brand of Swiss chocolate that we all know is made with milk from purple cows then wrapped in the aluminium foil by underpaid but happy marmots.

The purple cow meets a chocoholic fan (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

She enquired whether they could buy it, and Earth Daddy laughed indulgently. Scratching his designer stubble, he said that she could of course have some chocolate, but he was going to show her something better. I was curious, and tailgated my politically correct suspect and his cargo of organic bran like an off-beat Sherlock Holmes. Earth Daddy homed in on his destination, and beamed as he explained the concept of fair trade to his bemused offspring. I’m not sure she bought the idea, but he bought the chocolate anyway.

The stressed mother and her assortment of screaming kids are reassuringly normal.  They remind me of that family planning advert with the kid having a tantrum (check it out at the end of the post). Whilst a toddler with streams of yellow snot running down its face eats his way through a packet of biscuits in the seat of the trolley, a sibling imprisoned between the packets of pasta and disposable nappies tramples on the fresh fruit with one foot and hangs the rest of her body over the side, screaming “Muuum, want that, want thaaaat!” Stressed mother is haggard, determined and inches from sticking a price label on each kid’s forehead and leaving them on the discount shelf. 

Zero percent is generally female, appears depressed and is on a permanent guilt trip. Her relationship with food is borderline obsessive; she suspiciously reads every last letter of the packaging. She hunts down zero percent yoghurt, zero percent coke and beef that was no doubt gleaned from liposuctioned cattle on a health farm. Her trolley is so light you are surprised it doesn’t float up in the air before she gets to the till and disappear with her hanging on to it like Mary Poppins on helium.

Zero Percent on her way home with her stash of light food produce (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The alcoholic OAP wanders slowly to the wine shelf in espadrilles, sagging trousers, baggy jumper and a felt cap covered with dog hair. His trolley contains two five-litre plastic containers of red wine, two packs of goats cheese and two baguettes. He beams congenially at everyone when he forgets his credit card number twice in a row, then waves goodbye before using the trolley as an impromptu Zimmer frame. He probably won’t see another human being until he does the same shop in a week’s time.

The DINKIES (Dual Income, No KIddieS) are the ones who need a stepladder to access the expensive rare breed of imported Italian pasta on the top shelf whilst you are mining  for the last packet of supermarket brand macaroni in the murky depths of the bottom shelf. Miss DINKIE wrinkles her nose on seeing any of the above supermarket population categories, and goes into anaphylactic shock on contact with children. She can be observed at the toiletries dept, suspiciously sniffing at shampoo bottles whilst her bored boyfriend looks on.

The YFSM: Young, Free & Single Male. Easily identified by the contents of his basket: pizzas, chocolate, pasta sauce, pies, frozen chips and a pack of beer. Heart-wrenching examples are the cute ones who have packets of Petit Prince biscuits and M&M’s to eat in front of the TV. I generally avoid queuing beside a YFSM, as I get inexplicable pangs of jealousy at the idea of being able to not only have the remote for myself, but eat as much rubbish as I like without being told off.

There are more categories to be covered, such as the retired lovebirds, but this post is getting way too long. So I’ll pass the talking stick on to you: who are your favourite shoppers? Here is that advert I promised you, complete with an epic Earth Daddy fail.

Waiting room witterings: a portrait of France.

One month ago, I was in the rumbling bowels of the local Préfecture, clutching a huge pile of paper justifying everything from my address to my bra size in a bid to exchange my UK driving licence for a Barbie-pink French one. I was rewarded with a paper stating that I will have an answer within two months, and that no answer after two months means that the application has been refused. Not that it has been forgotten under a coffee cup on someone’s desk, lost or wrongly filed in the depths of pen-pusher’s oblivion.

So one month later, M.M. is watching her mailbox like a hawk as the sand trickles through the egg-timer. Still nothing. So in the meantime, here is the sequel to the driving licence saga : the waiting room.

At the end of the previous chapter, I had been given a ticket and ordered to “seet downeuh ozzeur zère”. The system was a little like queuing for cheese in Waitrose: You get a ticket, then wait for your number to flash up on the screen. There was another likeness with the cheese counter: the man sitting beside me, who smelled like he had been massaged with a microwaved mixture of Munster, Camembert and a generous pinch of fox poo before leaving the house. There were 32 people in front of me. I found myself calculating how long it would take to see the bespectacled civil servant behind the counter. My courage wilted faster than a salad platter in the Sahara as I realised that even at an average of five minutes per person, that added up to over two hours of waiting.

Typical French queuing technique. Note cockerel with file under wing.  (Photo credit: Sister72)

Big Brother stared out of every wall through shiny-white, technological snowdrops that recorded our every move. I was anxious. The Prefecture waiting room is a buzzing melting pot of people from all horizons who all have higher levels of adrenalin and testosterone than Lance Armstrong on the Tour de France. As the classic joke goes, the cockerel was chosen as the French emblem because it is “the only animal that can continue to sing with both its feet in the shit”. Yet the Gallic cockerel loses its infamous cock-a-doodle-doo when it crosses the threshold of Cerfa’s palace: it is tamed by the aura of Administromia, and this feeling of subordination peeves the French. They do not like waiting, and absolutely hate being dominated. (With the exception of some French politicians in their private lives, but that’s a whole different ball game. So to speak.)

They strutted around the golden administrative cage with ruffled feathers. Their beaks remained firmly closed, but signs of their frustration escaped in other ways. Papers were fiddled with, eyeballs rolled, pens were clicked and hisses of exasperation escaped from lips as watches were looked at for the umpteenth time. Knees jerked rapidly, feet tapped on the polished floor.

A line of neatly labelled counters stretched along the wall before us, eerily like the vivariums you see at the exotic species section of the zoo. A glass panel with a circular grill separated the civil servant within them from the tax payer on the other side.

A vivarium for the lesser spotted civil servant.

I squinted to read the sign in the window, expecting to read: “Lesser Spotted Civil Servant. Common French species under no imminent threat of extinction. Timid, it only ventures out of its lair for 35 hours per week. Please do not tap on the glass”. I was wrong: the sign was a veiled threat to the humble tax payer, and read as follows: “Vous et nous : le respect du droit, le droit du respect.” This basically boils down to: “We’ll respect your rights – if you respect us”.

At this point, a prim and proper retired lady approached, and sat down on the seat beside me. She heaved a huge sigh, looked up at the screen, and burst the bubble of perfection by loudly proclaiming: “Oh, putaing. Je n’y compreings rieng. C’est quoi, ce bordeleuh?” In polite language, this would roughly translate as “Oh, dear, I don’t understand. What kind of mess is this?” Her foul language and loudness were a comic revelation of the real person beneath the improvised exterior. I grinned to myself.

The “lady” hummed anxiously. The smelly man rhythmically jerked his knee up and down, shaking the entire bench and sending waves of stench up my reluctant nostrils. Nausea started to take hold of me. A man glared in our direction, and ostentatiously flapped his file in front of his nose.

 I had come prepared: I pulled out a pen and paper and started scribbling down my observations. It was striking to see how people preferred fiddling with Facebook to  discovering the bored person sitting right beside them. Bang in synch with what was going through my head, Mrs Mutton-dressed-as-lamb prodded me in the ribs. “Are you doing your homework?” she enquired, pointing at my scribbles. “No, I’m just writing”. She gave me a quizzical stare. Apparently, it was not at all strange for grown adults to play Angry Birds on their telephones, but it was strange to write for no reason. I nodded my head sideways. “I think someone’s going to lose his trousers in a minute”. She followed my gaze, and burst out laughing. Here’s the vision that met her eyes:

How to “hang out” in administromia – in the literal sense of the word. Photo taken for your eyes only, at MM’s perils and risks.

We waited patiently, and as the man walked past us two minutes later, his aptly named “saggy” was sliding slowly and suggestively downwards. Our impromptu Adonis split his thighs in an cowboy-like stance, and his trousers ground to a halt midway between his groin and his kneecaps. He was forced to stop beside my neighbour, who beamed up in delight at the sight of his taut thighs and generous manly attributes, all delicately wrapped in designer undies. As her number was called, I think she had already decided to come back again the next day in the hope of a Full Monty. The Préfecture was not so boring after all….