One Californian occasionally tries the UN-sanction approach. ‘You’re not going to smoke any more!’ he tells baffled French smokers, who wonder what he is going to do about it. Invade their table, maybe? This frontal attack never works. At best it causes a colonial war.
A New Yorker tries a more surreal approach. With his wonderfully American accent and a friendly smile, he tells cigar smokers, ‘Thank you so much for smoking that near me. Now I can tell everyone back home that Europeans smoke donkey merde.’ This method is satisfying, but equally pointless, because a Frenchman in a café does not give a donkey merde what Americans think of him.
The best method is to smile politely, say ‘bonjour’ and tell the smoker that although they of course have the right to smoke and live the way they please, you would greatly appreciate it if they could try to direct their smoke away from you because you would like to enjoy your meal, and your life, undisturbed by their cigarette. A friendly-sounding appeal to respect your lifestyle is the only way to get things done.
France is heading for an existential crisis over smoking. Women and young people are cutting back, but the hardcore of heavy smokers are hanging steadfastly on to their habit, which is cheap, cool and still not frowned upon by the general public.
This might soon change, though. Smoking is already forbidden in aeroplanes, buses, many trains and metro stations, and there are plans afoot to ban it in all public places. If this should happen, the new law will almost certainly be ignored. Petty French laws are usually considered to be for other people, not for moi. What’s more, any ban will cause the buralistes, the people who sell cigarettes, to go on strike and demand compensation for their lost income. There will almost certainly be protest marches in the streets (very slow marches, of course, so the demonstrators don’t get out of breath). So there’s a good chance the government will back down, or make the law so fuzzy that no one has to obey it if they don’t want to.
But this habit of smoking in restaurants begs a very simple question: the French claim to love fine food, but how on earth do they taste it? Perhaps that’s why they say that British and American food is so bland – there’s no nicotine in it.
Not Waiting for Godot
The French think that queues are for people who have time to waste, whose lives are so boring that they have nothing better to do. Waiting in line is an admission of defeat.
At bus stops, taxi ranks, cafés or almost anywhere where queueing is not imposed by barriers, the French will not wait patiently. Queueing barriers have only been introduced in the past few years, and the depressed look on the faces of Parisians who are obliged by little plastic posts and lengths of polyester to wait their turn proves how tough it is for them to give up their habit of pushing in.
I remember the first time I saw this system in operation in Paris. It was in the food hall of the old Marks & Spencer shop at Châtelet. There were three or four tills, and customers simply chose the shortest queue. Then one evening, when I went to buy my digestive biscuits and raspberry trifle, there was a kind of corral where we all had to wait for the first till to be free. The Brits adopted the system instantly, especially because there was a notice on a little stand saying ‘Queue here’, and we expats are usually pretty disciplined, old-school folk. The French, though, were totally lost. You could see it in their eyes as they read the sign. They were thinking, ‘Why should I wait back there behind that man holding the biscuits and that ridiculous English dessert when there is a till in front of me that is going to be free in ten seconds?’ Some of them simply ignored the system and pushed in (accompanied by much British huffing and cries of ‘That’s not cricket,’ of course). Others surrendered, shamefacedly went to the back of the line and tried not to look French.
Shortly afterwards, M&S pulled out of France. The newspapers said it was for group strategy reasons, but I’m sure it had something to do with trying to introduce obligatory queueing in Paris too soon.
The barriers have now been put up in most large post offices, which is a good thing, because the most spectacular piece of queue-jumping I have ever seen happened in a Paris post office without barriers.
It was at the 24/7 office in the rue du Louvre. I was there on a Sunday morning with a trolleyload of books to send off. Stupidly, I’d had a lie-in, and when I got across town at eleven a.m., there was a long, winding line of about twenty people waiting to go up to one of only two open windows. They were standing slightly back from the counter, as if to make it clear that the person at the front had the option of moving left or right according to which window became free first. Things were moving very slowly, and everyone was itching with impatience. The
