People in Paris 3: Fun and games at the supermarket

And in this post we will venture into the supermarket, a hotbed of insults, aggression and venom. 

a)    CHOOSE A TILL

I was at the supermarket one day, waiting at the till to pay. Not wishing to breathe down the neck of the person in front of me, I was standing a little way back. A man strode up, looked me up and down, and unceremoniously deposited his groceries on the till in front of me.

“Were you here?” he demanded.

“Well, yes,” I said. “But never mind. I’m not in a rush. You can go first.”

At which he flew into a wild rage.

“You must stand either at this till or at that till!” he shouted. “There’s no point in standing between two tills. How am I even supposed to know you are at the till?”

By this time, the cashier was ready to receive the next customer, but not sure which of us to serve first.

“Are you going to go?” the man demanded of me, indicating my purchases.

I resisted the urge to snatch the wine bottle from the till and break it on his face.

“Please,” I said, in the most charming tone I could muster, while lava boiled inside me. “After you.”

“No!” he bellowed. “If you were at the till then you must go first! But you must actually stand in the line! Go!”

So I pushed past him, paid for my purchases, bestowed my sweetest smile on the cashier and left without a backward glance at the man.

Yes, your mother told you that manners cost nothing, but sometimes they come at the cost of ruptured blood vessels.

b)      UNLOAD YOUR BASKET

Another time at the supermarket, the man in front of me deposited his basket on the counter but didn’t unload it, being completely engrossed in reading his emails on his phone. The cashier politely invited him to unload the basket.

“Yes, madame,” he told her in a syrupy, patience-of-a-saint tone. “I have every intention of doing so.” And he turned back to his phone and finished reading his email while the cashier tapped her manicured fingers on the vegetable scale. When he was good and ready, he shifted his basket to the end of the till so he could start unloading it, which automatically set the conveyor belt into action. He raised his hands from the basket and looked at it aghast as it sailed down towards the cashier.

“Yes, but I cannot unload it while the conveyor belt is moving, madame,” he informed her. She raised her eyes to heaven as she stopped the belt. He paid for his purchases and departed, phone to ear, with a charming, “Bonne journée, madame!”

c)       WHY PEOPLE DIE PREMATURELY

On yet another occasion, the cashier took a break from the growing queue of customers to help a man with a query.

“Excuse me, monsieur,” called out the woman at the front of the queue, “but you have customers to serve here.”

“Just a moment,” replied the cashier. “I just have to help this gentleman.”

“But that’s not right!” spluttered the woman second in the queue. “You can’t neglect your customers! Otherwise why even have a till open?”

“Then feel free to go to the other till,” replied the cashier most charmingly.

“No!” the woman burst out. “You can’t have so many customers and just one till open!”

Then the woman who was second in the queue said to the woman who was at the front, “May I go in front of you, madame? I have just a few things and I’m in a terrible rush.”

“Well, no, not really,” replied the other woman haughtily. “We’re all in a rush, you know. We all have things to do.”

The cashier served the two women, and as the second one headed for the door, he asked her, “Are you all right?”

“No, I’m not actually,” she called back over her shoulder. “I’m running late!” And she tapped her watch.

The cashier smiled cheerfully. “You know why people keep dying prematurely?” he called after her. “It’s because they get all stressed over little things.”

d)      BISCUITS

I dropped into the supermarket one evening to pick up some biscuits to take to work, because although people keep bringing an endless variety of teas and coffees into the staff room, to the point where there is no longer any space to put them, the importance of biscuits never seems to occur to anyone.

The cashier asked if I wanted a bag, and I said no, so he passed the biscuits to me.

“Ha ha!” sniggered the woman behind me in the queue. “Look how she snatches those biscuits!”

“Yes,” agreed the cashier gleefully, “she took them right from me!”

“They’re her biscuits!” shouted the woman.

“She wants them now!” gurgled the cashier. “She doesn’t want anyone else to touch her biscuits!”

They continued this banter for a bit, which I ignored at first, but after the joke had worn thin, I got irritated and said, “Actually, they’re not for me. I’m going to take them to work and share them with my colleagues.”

The woman completely ignored me. “They’re only hers!” she ploughed on.

“Yes!”  cackled the cashier. “Don’t touch her biscuits!”

So I gave them both my fakest smile and breezed off.

ANNEXE: WHERE’S THE PARTY?
Two things that didn't happen at the supermarket.

Fancy-dress parties are all well and good, but what are you doing wandering the streets of Paris at 11:00 on a Friday morning dressed as a vampire, an air hostess, or a clown with a Rubik’s cube around his waist with fake legs flopping over the front of it? At least the four Japanese girls dressed in girly sailor suits one Saturday night were obviously going to a party. 

And nothing can explain the man in his fifties who got on the metro wearing:

Black shoes, a cross between boots and sandals

Black knee-highs

Black satin hot pants

A silver cable-knit jumper

An academic cloak

A black hat resembling nothing so much as a mushroom.

He sat down demurely and out of his small ladies’ handbag he produced a diary, which he proceeded to leaf through for the next five minutes. 

Loitering at the fuzzy edges of reality

Hang around there long enough and there's no telling what you might find.

Reasons not to scratch at the stove top

As I waited for a pot of water to boil one day, the red glow of the hotplate showed up some impurities burnt onto the surface of the stove. So I picked up a silver teaspoon and started idly scratching at the black bits with it.

And next thing – and this is no word of a lie – the teaspoon melted. A chunk of it liquefied and dropped onto the stove top. I had no idea that teaspoons did that.

As I scrabbled around for paper towel to wipe the molten metal off the stove top, I knocked over a glass jar, and next thing there was broken glass all over the floor.

I wiped up the molten silver, then  picked up the biggest pieces of glass and went to get the vacuum cleaner to deal with the smaller pieces. But the vacuum cleaner had inexplicably stopped working. So I had to sweep up the shards as best I could with a broom.

On the bright side, though, the water boiled beautifully. 

EPILOGUE: A splinter of glass escaped the broom and somehow migrated down the passage. I stepped on it several days later while walking around barefoot.

Please read

At the university where I work, notices are sometimes put up outside the office for the attention of the students. One appeared recently with a severe instruction written at the top: MUST BE READ BY ALL STUDENTS! in bright red. This is what the students were being instructed to read:

Five pages of rules and regulations for the exams. Which I’m sure were very important, but that’s not really the point, is it?

There is nothing for you out there

As anyone who has ever spent any amount of time here knows, Paris is the centre of the world. Correction: Paris is the world. There is nothing outside. Nothing! The map-making authorities confirm this.

The topmost horizontal road is the périphérique – the ring road around the city. As you can see, nothing exists beyond the bounds of the city. 

(Except perhaps Saint Ouen, but that's really more of a hypothetical concept than an actual place.)

Displaced duck

I have walked past this fountain a hundred times and there has never before been so much as a suggestion of a duck in it. It is in the city centre, surrounded by concrete and paving stones, and there is nothing for a duck to eat around here.

Who put a duck in the fountain???

Hidden garden

Another university that I teach at (the one I mentioned in the previous post - the one that scheduled its holidays without consulting me) is in a bit of a bleak location and doesn’t have much in the way of cheery lunch spots. When I can’t avoid having lunch there, I generally go and sit on a bench opposite the station. This is the bench:

It’s a two-way bench. If you get tired of looking at trams, you can turn round and sit the other way, in which case the view is this:

which is not much of an improvement, granted, but still, it allows for variety, which is something.

I was sitting on the bench eating my sandwich and reading when I heard a voice saying, “Excuse me, can I disturb you for a moment?”

I looked up and saw a pretty blonde young woman approaching. She sat down on the bench and leaned towards me in a confidential manner.

“There is a very pretty park in that building,” she said, pointing to the gate next to the bank. “There, there!” she said urgently, pointing at two women going in at the gate. “Go in with the ladies!”

But the gate had already closed behind them.

“The code is –” she murmured, and told me the code. “Then you can avoid eating in the street.”

She gave me a dazzling smile, stood up, and was gone. Repeating the code to myself so that I wouldn’t forget it, I went and typed it on the keypad next to the gate. The gate swung open and I found myself in the parking area outside a block of flats. There was a pretty little lawn in front of the building, but was that what she was talking about?

No, it wasn't. I went round the back of the building and was faced with this:

I went up the path and sat on a bench. Nobody was around. It was a beautiful spring day, flowers of all colours decorated the grass, the birds were singing a veritable symphony in the trees, and my sandwich and I sat there for twenty minutes with just the birds and the trees for company.

Spring morning clichés

I had to go out early one morning, and it was such a beautiful day that I couldn’t bear the thought of burrowing underground to go by metro. I was near the Promenade Plantée, an incredibly pretty path that runs from the Bastille to the Bois de Vincennes, and it seemed a pity to waste the opportunity, so I took the scenic route.

It was the mellowest of mornings; the morning for which springtime clichés were made. The sun bathed the buildings in a gentle golden glow; the pink blossoms on the trees announced spring.

There was not a cloud in the clear blue sky.

The sun was shining; the birds were singing; walkers were walking, runners were running:

skippers were skipping:

and tigers were resting. 

And the universe smiled upon me.

Some things never get old

And this is one of them: my Wednesday backdrop.

And another: my Wednesday evening walk home.

         

Gleeden

A business has to be fairly successful if it has the funds to carpet-bomb an unsuspecting public with adverts. This one apparently is:

A dating site aimed specifically at married women.

It gleefully plasters its ads all over the metro:

"On principle, we do not offer loyalty cards"

"Being faithful to two men is being twice as faithful"

 It rams them down your throat as you stand at the bus stop:

"Unlike anti-depressants, a lover costs nothing to public healthcare"

It commandeers billboards and buses, distracting you as you drive, :

"Holidays are a chance to go and look elsewhere"

"How about cheating on your lover with your husband this year?"

    

The astonishing thing, of course, is not that such a site exists (if it didn't, it would be invented quickly enough), but that the adverts made it past the censor and into the public arena.

In fairness to the viewing public, this ad campaign has not gone down well. There has been an avalanche of news articles and blog posts condemning the site, the concept and the clients, and the posters are regularly torn down or otherwise vandalised. (At my local metro station, one of these adverts has been ripped to shreds at least five times – but it's always back up again a couple of days later.) 

So, what have we learnt?

1) Don't scratch at the stove top (although you shouldn't really need me to tell you that).

2) Watch out for those wandering splinters of glass.

3) Sometimes you are presented with five pages of rules and regulations and you just have to read them.

4) The world outside Paris does not exist.

5) Wildlife turns up in the most incongruous places.

6) Dull-looking doors can conceal treasures. 

7) Some things never get old. 

8) There's a website out there for everyone. 

Impromptu tourism

It’s always somewhat painful when the alarm goes off at 6 in the morning, especially in winter. It’s dark, it’s cold, it’s an unnatural time to be out in the world.

This trauma is thankfully no more than a weekly occurrence for me. On Monday mornings I voyage forth to teach at a university out in the back of beyond, way outside the self-contained world that is Paris. Once I get there, things generally go swimmingly, but the process of getting there can require superhuman effort.

When I arrived at work last Monday, having gone through the requisite trauma, I went to the reception to pick up my registers and was received by a blank look from the receptionist, followed by a little noise of astonishment.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded. “There are no lessons this week!”

“Oh,” I said, since there was very little else I could say under the circumstances.

It turns out that the university had a week’s break, but since I just bungee in and bungee back out once a week, I’m not really very plugged into the system and don’t particularly keep track of incidental information like holiday dates.

So finding myself with an unexpectedly free day, I wished the receptionist well and wandered back to the metro station, where I looked in quiet amusement at all the people who had just dragged themselves out of bed (I had by this point been awake for two hours) and who were lumbering off to start a day of work. 

There were some parks that I had been planning to visit for some time but I always got too carried away with daily routine to do so. But now with my daily routine interrupted, it was a perfect opportunity to go and tick some parks off my list.  

I left the sleepy people on the metro and went to have a wander round Parc Kellerman, where I watched ducks having breakfast and gardeners sweeping paths as well as the odd disturbingly enthusiastic jogger plodding their way among the trees.

I pressed on with a scenic walk through the Jardin Thomire and past the Charléty stadium, to Parc Montsouris. I had a moment of déjà vu and then realised that I had been there five years ago one a visit to Paris. Crocuses were pushing up through the grass, announcing the arrival of spring, and a Chinese man was doing tai chi among the trees.

Suitably uplifted, I got on the train and headed towards the city centre to the Jardin de Luxembourg. People were walking dogs, joggers were out in full force and a man was sitting on a bench brushing his teeth. In the background, the Montparnasse Tower disappeared up into the clouds.

From there I headed for the Jardin des Plantes, where a slope had become eroded, exposing a tree’s roots, and a statue of a lion was eating what was left of a person, which was just a foot.

The Jardin des Plantes is home to the natural history museum, which had a magnificent exhibition on called Nuit, which dealt with all things nocturnal.

The first section of the exhibition was about the night sky – the moon, the stars, the planets. In this section I was most suprised to learn that the planets in our solar system all spin on very different axes. How did I get this far without knowing that? Uranus has somehow turned onto its side, and Venus has tilted so far that its top and bottom are entirely reversed. 

I also learned how tides work, which was another shameful gap in my general knowledge. Everyone knows that the moon pulls on the sea, making it rise on the side of the earth closest to the moon. But did you know that the moon and Earth create a centrifugal system as they rotate round each other? And that centrifugal system sends the water on the side of the Earth opposite the moon swinging outwards? So the ocean on one side of Earth is being flung outwards by centrifugal force and on the other side it’s being pulled by the moon, which is why the tide is high on opposite sides of the Earth at the same time.

I also found out that on 10 August 2014 the moon will be at its closest point to the Earth, and will be quite magnificent. Put it in your diary.

There was this video display (happily also available on YouTube) on the relative sizes of various celestial bodies, which was possibly the most intimidating thing I’ve ever seen.

I watched it through four times and came away with shaking knees and a crushing sense of insignificance, and went to seek solace among the creatures of the night.

The animals were beautiful and it was slightly awkward to think that they were probably going about their nocturnal business quite contentedly before someone put a bullet through them and dragged them off to be preserved, stuffed and placed in a display, but I swept that niggling thought under my mental carpet and marvelled at the stern stare of owls, the deer caught mid-step, the grey goose suspended in flight and the wolf pricking up its ears at a sound in the underbrush.

It’s an incredible skill, taxidermy. How do you take the lifeless carcass of an animal, preserve it and then arrange it in such a way – limb positions, attitude, even facial expressions – that it looks as if it has been suddenly frozen while going about its regular business?

There was a very interesting display on the sense of smell (included in the exhibition because some animals use smell to guide them when there is little light), including some delightful pictures of animals flehmening - drawing back the top lip and inhaling to better analyse an odour.

There was also a display of the most incredible insects which mimicked leaves so convincingly that even knowing that they were insects, I was unable to see their wings for wings and could only see them as leaves.

Following a very cute array of diurnal animals bedding down for the night, there were some information sheets about dreaming, from which I learned that the reason we forget our dreams so quickly is that the part of the brain that deals with memory is not activated during dreaming.

Then there was a frilly pastel-coloured, carpeted room made to suggest a bedroom, with some blurbs about monsters under the bed and a Pixaresque animation on the subject, followed by a slightly incongruous display cabinet full of vampire memorabilia and an inexplicable room, empty but for two sumptuous-looking chairs, with a curtain over the entrance, and a shadow display that didn’t work. The shadow display was set up in a grey concrete corridor which terminated in a set of stairs that emerged out by the ticket office.

And that was the night exhibition.

I was by this point tired and hungry, and although I had enjoyed the exhibition very much, I was quite ready for lunch. But my ticket gave me access to the permanent exhibition, and I thought it would be a pity to waste it, so I went and had a quick nose round upstairs.

I was glad I had because the first thing you see when you go into the permanent exhibition is an entire whale skeleton suspended from the ceiling. I had been thinking about whales just the day before and wondering if I would ever be able to see one. It remains on my bucket list, but the skeleton went some way towards satisfying my curiosity. 

SO, WHAT HAVE WE LEARNT?

1) Those early mornings never get any easier...

2) ...but they can turn out to be worth it

3) Some people go jogging early in the morning

4) Spring is coming!

5) The axes of our neighbouring planets are a lot more irregular than you might expect

6) On one side of the Earth, the sea is pulled by the moon, while on the other side it is flung outwards by centrifugal force. That's why there are high tides on opposite sides of the world at the same time. 

7) Look at the moon on 10 August 2014. 

8) Stars are terrifyingly huge

9) It's almost impossible to remember your dreams. 

10) Check the permanent exhibition before you go for lunch. There might be something  worthwhile in it. 

Mother knows best

When I was little I used to ask my mother all sorts of questions about the world. She was the fount of all knowledge and it never occurred to me that she might not know the answer to a question. 

Things haven't changed much now that I'm all grown up. I still expect my mother to know the answer to everything. The only thing that has changed is the kind of question I ask. Where it used to be "Mom, what's under the floorboards?" (The foundations of the house - and lots of spiders) or "Why do dogs eat grass?" (It's their vegetables) or "Look at this green stone I found! Do you think it's an emerald?" (No, darling, I think it's a piece of green glass), I now ask infinitely duller questions like "Mom, do you think I can contest this parking ticket?" and "How do you go about choosing a pension plan?" and "Why has Microsoft Excel changed this list of numbers into obscure formulas?"

And she still always has the answer. 

Calvin's dad says that fathers get a book. I think mothers get one too. 

This is what it says in my mother's book: 

1. Do you have a tissue in your pocket?

2. Do you have your keys?

3. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Just take it one step at a time.

4. I'm just going to let this one ride. I've learnt in life that you have to choose your battles carefully.

5. A year from now, will it still matter? (And if it won't, then there's no need to get stressed over it now.)

6. Don’t wear yourself out. It’s much more productive to have a rest and recharge, then continue later.

7. Hey – where did you learn to eat without laying the table properly first?!

8. Why are you sitting in here with all the windows closed?

9. I need to tidy up here before I get down to work. I can’t concentrate with all this clutter lying around.

10. What’s mine, my darling, is yours.

11. Networking, sweetheart, networking! 

And once you've made contacts, you have to groom them. 

12. Insomnia is when you are lying in bed with your eyes closed and sleep doesn’t come. Sitting in front of the computer reading Wikipedia at 3 in the morning isn’t insomnia.

13. Don’t you think you should have something to eat before you go out? No, not a biscuit, I mean proper food.

14. Now, let’s be organised about this.

15. Write yourself a list.

16. Take a pen from the cupboard in the hall – there’s a whole pack of them there. There are also paper clips, rubber bands, bottles of Tipp-ex, rolls of Sellotape, and all manner of things that are just there and have always been there and will always been there.

17. Come on, focus!

18. Sometimes you can tell just by looking at people what they are thinking.

19. You can roll your eyes all you like, but what I’m telling you comes from the lofty heights of experience.

20. You may not understand now but one day you’ll understand.

21. Never volunteer information. If they need additional information they will ask for it.

22. You must put moisturiser on your face. Because otherwise when you are 40 you will look like a dried-up old prune, and you will come to me and say, “I wish I had used moisturiser”, and I’ll be so upset and I won’t be able to do anything about it. But I can do something about it now, so I’m telling you, please use moisturiser.

23. I have no patience with the way children are mollycoddled and indulged at school now. In my day, there were none of these games and fun activities and brightly-coloured textbooks with pictures on every page. We sat quietly, you listened to the lesson, and we didn’t give the teacher any nonsense. And we learned.

24. No, I didn’t drink the cup of tea, but it was nice to have it sitting there.

25. Of course I’m ready for my trip next week. My suitcase has been packed and waiting at the door for the last two weeks.

26. There's time to do anything, but always at the expense of something else. 

27. I’m doing it like baking a cake. (When my mother bakes a cake, she puts the flour and sugar out on the kitchen counter one day and the butter and eggs the next day, then the following day she mixes everything , she bakes it the day after that, and ices it the day after that. It takes a week to make a cake, one step at a time.)

27. Tomorrow is another day.