Dialogue (in French) at Intermarché
RR: There are no toilets in this supermarket? (NOTE: In France it's more chic to phrase questions as statements on a rising cadence than reversing verb and pronoun as we were all taught at school.)
Svelte Young Lady in Customer Service: There are none, Monsieur
RR: Why?
SYLICS: The building is too small.
RR: But some of your customers may feel the need...
SYLICS: It is simply a matter of floor area. (NOTE: For floor area she employs the French word superficie. I recognise its meaning and am ravished)
RR: A French thing, then?
SYLICS: Indeed.
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Days later we (RR, daughters Professional Bleeder and Occasional Speeder) are hunting down a near relation of Poulet de Bresse (see pic) for which I am expecting to pay up to £25. The hunt is complicated by the fact that two of us are also suffering from that very special personal need alluded to above. Super-U (another supermarket) is the most likely source. Dare we risk the journey given we may end up chickenless and horribly embarrassed by Super-U's possible lack of a loo. PB checks her mobile phone and discovers there is a toilet off the Super-U's entrance foyer. We drive over and I rush towards the welcoming door. Inside I read a crudely written notice: Pas de papier à cause du vol. I emerge ashen face and my nearest and dearest supply me with several packets of tissue which all sensible women carry instead of handkerchieves. I sing their praises to the skies.
How was the chicken?
ReplyDelete(My empathy for your other concern. In the American vernacular, been there done that; only, no one had tissues. Made do with those brown, scratchy generic paper towels that take forever to roll out of the dispenser. Bless your heart.)
Crow: For decades I'd always regarded chicken as food for invalids, those whose innards should not be excited in any way. It was while we owned the house in France that VR bought and roasted a chicken costing twice what we would have spent in the UK and I experienced how good real chicken can be. The chicken from Super-U was not quite PdB standards but it cost 19 euros (= $21) and was excellent.
ReplyDeleteAs to the other matter, once we became aware that many French supermarkets lack this vital (and humane) facility we got into the habit of asking each other ("Have you been recently...?") before setting out on shopping expeditions. As if we'd all become much much younger and someone else (an adult) had taken charge of our bowel movements. Good material for blogging, though.
Thank you for your good wishes towards the part of my anatomy you specify. Perhaps another part should also have been addressed.
From my walk round the Welsh boundary - one carries paper at all times on such a trip (says he smugly.). This would not be so good for doing the Guardian crossword if it were raining.
ReplyDeleteClick on link.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ax4mlpw9tj5r1uf/IMG_3375%20copy.JPG?dl=0
That chicken makes me feel queasy now after reading your story.
ReplyDeleteThere was a time in the 1970s when the French variety of public toilet esp. in the south (two pads for stepping on and if you're lucky a handle somewhere) was something exotic. Despite the difficulties it entailed when one was wearing a wrap - around skirt. All part of the fun.
Sir Hugh: But where does self-protection end? Might one also carry a disinfectant spray to ensure one's bum wasn't exposed to a toilet-seat used by someone with lower hygiene standards? Detergent to wash one's smalls after half a day's sweating? More particularly, might one turn back home following the realisation that one had forgotten any of these "essentials". I am not in favour of squalor for squalor's sake but might you be in danger of over-doing the primness, having left behind all traces of Eric Shipton's argument with his climbing partner as to whether two shirts were necessary for a multi-month assault on - was it? - Nanga Parbat?
ReplyDeleteSabine: It was one of Europe's paradoxes that Germany, a country that had nominally lost WW2, offered better standards of hygiene in 1953 (when I stayed with a German family in the Ruhr) compared to France - nominally a WW2 winner - with its pissoirs out on the street and its Asiatiques within, when I first visited the country in 1958. France, during those early post-war years, not only appeared poverty-stricken but lacking in hope and any form of energy. And please understand, I loved and still love both those countries.
But France has moved on to become a worthy partner, with Germany, in making the EU work and ensuring France's annual 60m foreign visitors are well accommodated. It is a modern country but with sufficient quaintness to prove it still has a "national" heart. Just one example: if you use a satnav in France you need to update it annually, the road-building programme there is that dynamic. That same satnav used in Britain could work unchanged for years.
The French attitude towards supermarket loos is a mystery, but mystery is part of France's attraction, not least in the way this is manifest in its language. France appeals to me intellectually. Germany (no less intellectual, of course) appeals to me in its warmth, in the way the citizens of Cologne comforted me when I bleated to them about the horrors of Brexit. In the way they go out of their way to help foreigners. The fact that soon Britain will be separated from these two magnificent and highly individualistic countries is a matter of great sadness to me.
I suspect the stores in question sell tissue of some sort.
ReplyDeleteedsbath: You have no idea what pressure I was under.
ReplyDelete