November, the new October…The colours of the landscape are majestic and yet the prevailing mood, despite the American mid-term election results, is one of hopelessness. While under no illusions about life in the British Isles, I find myself growing increasingly irritated by life in this beautiful country. Every day, I still count my blessings, but every day in every way I become more irked by the people and the system within which I try to exist unnoticed.
Our recent ‘city break’ to Bordeaux, keenly anticipated since the Good Wife found us a great deal at our favourite five-bedroom hotel on Booking.com, exemplified many of my gripes. With scheduled strikes and demonstrations, we had to cancel our train tickets (once again; This is France, Jake) and go by car. We left it in a park-and-ride in the back of beyond just off the Rocade, but trying to find the appropriate ticket was as hard as trying to get a refund for our train tickets from SNCF (la Société Nationale des Conneries et Folies that runs the railways here). When we phoned, the Office du Tourisme seemed to think that a 2-day/3-night ticket would entitle us to unlimited travel on the trams during our stay. The woman in the nearby Tabac wasn’t so sure and suggested we both buy a 15-ride ticket. The ticket machine at the tram stop was devoid of any helpful information. So we gambled on the Tourist Office knowing what they were talking about.
Our tram travelled no further than Stalingrad, a suburb on the wrong side of the river whose name alone fills you with misgivings. So we joined the human throng and walked across the bridge to Bordeaux proper – to be greeted by the sound of an angry mob shepherded by police armed with machine guns. I’d already run into local gendarmes on Halloween night, stopped on the way home from dinner with friends at their watermill. A bad omen perhaps. Debs and I were in fancy dress as the ghosts of John Dillinger and his moll – which served as a good excuse to wear a favourite double-breasted suit that doesn’t see much active service these days in the heart of nowhere. With a decorative scar and a pencil-thin moustache, I probably looked more like someone in The Addams Family than Dillinger – which on reflection is probably a good thing. Get out of that car with your hands held high!
Anyway, you’ll be delighted to learn that despite my appearance I passed my breath-test with flying colours. More to the point, things seemed to be more under control in Bordeaux than they were a fortnight or so before. On perusing the rue Sainte Catherine, Bordeaux’s main shopping drag, I was shocked by the number of windows that had been broken and boarded up. The chipboard industry was the only thing doing a roaring trade. What was it the Wailers sang? A hungry mob is a angry mob. But no one, or nearly no one, really goes hungry in France. Yes, of course, there are things to gripe about. The cost of living goes up and up. The rich get richer, while the poor get poorer and the middle classes get squeezed between them. But this recent crisis has been triggered by a mad megalomaniac in the U.S. of A., who likes to start wars and build triumphal arches, so why smash shop windows and threaten the livelihoods of people in the same boat?
The answer, it seems to me, lies in mankind’s obsessive compulsive impulse (or OCI for short) to destroy. In Rennes, caught up in just such an angry mob, just before the COVID apocalypse, I watched a guy with a smile on his face try in vain to smash the window of a jewellery shop, as if it were a video game. De-struction Trumps con-struction in the world of today.
Fortunately, full-scale revolution didn’t break out, at least not while we were there in our favourite French city. It feels quite familiar now. We had the same bedroom as we had a few years ago in Casa Blanca, our ‘boutique hotel’ near the elegant Jardin Public. I went to the same opticians, Lunettes Pour Tous, to have the glasses I bought last time adjusted so they no longer slip down my nose when I try to read. And I went back to my favourite record shop, Diabolo Menthe, run by the sweetest guy even to run a disquaire, to buy a few more records that I don’t need. While her obsessive compulsive husband was satisfying such primordial needs, his thoughtful partner was buying him a pair of thermal vests from nearby Uniqlo because said husband hadn’t the sense to bring a warmer jacket to counteract the sudden plunge in temperature.
We even found the same Italian restaurant near the Musée des Beaux Arts where we’d eaten so well and so inexpensively last time, and reserved a table for two for Wednesday lunchtime, only to decide on reflection that it would be better to cram everything we wanted to do into the Tuesday, cancel the reservation and head for home after the copious hotel breakfast before the demonstrations started in earnest.
A pair of country bumpkins half-starved of culture, we packed it in during Day 2, with three exhibitions either side of lunch at Maison Anh, a Vietnamese domestic-restaurant not far from the Gare St. Jean, down a long straight street of the distinctive Second Empire double-fronted échoppes that house today’s petit bourgeoisie. We knocked on the front door and were shown into the dining room. The sudden startling babble of diners made me think of a 1930s Speakeasy. The food was both exceptional and affordable; little wonder that the place was packed.
This hotbed of lunching humanity served up a stark contrast to MéCa, a huge angular slab of concrete beside the Gironde in the hinterland of the station. It reminded me of a cross between Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim building in Bilbao and something faceless that Kafka might have dreamed up. As we walked around it looking in vain for a way in, I envisaged a tiny figure way above us waving for help to get out. Once finally inside the vast open space inhabited only by a security man on his phone and a young woman dwarfed by her welcome desk, the installations we found on the floors above were underwhelming.
Over our copious breakfast the next morning, we chatted with a pair of 60-somethings, husband and husband, from Sydney. They were in Bordeaux for a week as part of an extensive European holiday. Reading between the lines, it seems to me that things work better in Sydney, with its modern metro and international citizenry, than they do here in the Old World. Bordeaux’s tram system, the dream of Alain Juppé, is great – but it would be greater still down under or in somewhere like Denmark. We moaned about our visit to the TPB (Transport pour Bordeaux) office at the Gare St. Jean. Our tickets we had soon discovered were invalid for travel; so we wanted to know why. A typically officious woman railed at us: of course they were invalid; they only covered the parking and two trips on the tram, there and back. So we’d therefore bought two tickets where one would have done? We weren’t the first to make this mistake, she told us. So why, we were tempted to ask, is this not made clear to the unassuming, unaccustomed visitor?
In France, you learn just about everything by bitter experience. In fact, it took one of the Australians to explain that if we weren’t eligible for a refund for our return train ticket, then we should seek ‘compensation’ for the cancellation of our train.
We would have been happy to chat to the travellers all morning, but the waitress needed to clear up and we needed to get off home before the demonstrations turned into a new French Revolution. Some but not all trams were running, we discovered. I bought two tickets for the end of Line A where, hopefully, our car was awaiting us. The ticket machine coughed up one ticket only. Debs telephoned the TPB office. No, we couldn’t travel with one valid ticket and a receipt; we would have to buy another ticket and then claim back the money from the TPB site. This life in France is forever complicated by officialdom. Pragmatism and common sense are dirty words here.
At the time of writing, neither of us has received compensation from SNCF nor gone through the pain and frustration of trying to claim back €1,85. We plan to purely as a matter of principle.
