Then a woman walked in, a chic type with a leather jacket, high heels and a black ponytail. She took one look at the line of losers and marched straight up to stand behind the person getting served at one of the windows. A howl of protest went up.
‘What are you all doing standing there?’ she asked scornfully. ‘I come here all the time and no one ever queues like that. We just go to stand in front of one of the windows.’ She turned her back on the protesters, and three seconds later the long queue had self-destructed and there were two lines, one at each window. The social experiment had failed.
The post-office workers didn’t intervene, of course. It wasn’t their problem. And anyway, French officials are too concerned with looking cool to enforce petty regulations.
This is also true at airports. At a French airport, if the airline announces that a flight will begin boarding by rows 40–57, absolutely everyone goes forward to board. And the ground staff will often let everyone through. So if you are trying to reach your seat in row 57, when you finally get on the plane you’ll be held up by a couple blocking the aisle in row 12 as they try to ram their over-sized hand luggage into the overhead compartment, a man laying out his newspapers, computer and palm pilot in row 16 ready for his work session after take-off, and similarly infuriating queue-jumpers in rows 21, 25, 30, and 34.
If you try this trick at an American airport, though, you’ll be turned back and told to wait until your row is called. I once watched a semi-organized line degenerate into a rugby scrum as French passengers came up against American ground staff when boarding an Air France Miami–Paris flight. People with boarding cards for the unannounced rows shoved forward, were turned back and then loitered at the front of the line so that they would be first on board when their time came, or even earlier if they saw the people checking row numbers give in to the pressure and let just one passenger on prematurely. The queue spread out and broke up rather like a tide of Tour de France cyclists ramming into the back of a crashed truck. Soon the whole section of departure lounge had been turned into an impenetrable jam. Thanks to the French passengers, a technique to make boarding smoother had produced total anarchy.
Again, it’s all about moi, my life, my lifestyle. If yours were important, you would be trying to push in front of me instead of standing like a cow waiting for its turn at the abattoir. France’s real motto is Liberté, Egalité, Get out of My Way.
Drive Me Crazy
Red lights are, of course, just another form of queue. So the French attitude to them is simple – they are only there to keep me from doing my really important stuff. And French drivers have two other philosophical reasons to ignore red lights. First, like condoms, they were invented by some fusspot who thinks I don’t know how to look after myself. Second, if I decide it’s safe to run the light, it’s safe – I’m French, so I know best.
All this makes driving in France a hair-raising business.
I once had to drive from Siena to Florence airport (yes, geography fans, I’ve switched to Italy now). I was nervous about this, partly because I was alone and this was before there were little satellite devices in cars to tell you when to turn left and right, but mostly because I’d been fed the myth that Italians are the worst drivers in Europe.
The myth, I soon realized, was just that. I got hopelessly lost in Florence, swerved and weaved my way across lanes and junctions, drove the wrong way down a one-way street, stalled while trying to read my map in the middle of a roundabout, and yet I survived unscathed. The Italians seemed to be prepared for other drivers to behave like lunatics, and happy to let them get on with it.
In France (or Paris, anyway) I would have ended up in hospital and/or the wreckers’ yard.
Parisian drivers not only drive like lunatics, they are also completely intolerant of other lunatics. I recently took a taxi from Charles de Gaulle airport into Paris, and the driver was a living example of this double lunacy. The traffic was heavy, and as we passed a turn-off for Le Bourget exhibition centre, cars were zig-zagging across the lanes like drunken puppies.
‘Look, one of these people is going to cause an accident,’ my driver said, accelerating straight into the path of a car that was clearly determined to cut him up. ‘Did you see that?’ he asked when I awoke from my dead faint. ‘He nearly caused an accident.’
In some countries, it’s the brake that keeps drivers out of trouble. In France, it’s the accelerator. The driver who manages to look mad and dangerous enough will win through every time. He will probably get killed smashing into the back of a truck while doing 200kph through black ice on a foggy day (his last words – ‘What was that idiot trucker doing out on the roads on a day like this?’), but before then he will be le roi de la route.
Ironically, these huge pile-ups are even worse in summer, when French individualism behind the wheel is combined with the holiday herd instinct. Almost every car owner in the country heads for the motorway on one of six Saturdays in summer – the first weekends in July and August, the weekends closest to the bank holidays in mid-July and mid-August, and the last weekends of both months. These six grands départs are for the suicidal only. The jams on the main roads are like hundred-mile-long queues, with all the trauma that this implies
