9 June 2017
Bloody foreigners. I’ve cleaned out the fridge, eaten the last yoghurt, chucked out the olives and the rest of the rice, the end of the butter, a forlorn courgette and all the sundry dregs of a week away alone, and there’s a single slice of ham in its plastic tray, half a camembert, a tomato and a large bunch of spring onions. These last were an inspired purchase last Sunday when in some sort of deluded, unsustainable health drive I decided I would eat salad every day. Even before I reached the checkout their slender white stalks had been buried beneath a decent cured sausage, a large pat of soft blue cheese and a couple of bottles of vin ordinaire. They spent the week entirely alone in the salad thing at the bottom of the fridge, and here they were now. Their moment had come. Well, for one of them it had. I set to work.
I peeled back the lid of the ham tray and trimmed the meat into two long rectangles. Now I cut several thin slices of the camembert, soft and oozing. I laid them over the ham and added slices of tomato. Finally I sprinkled, with what I imagined to be a flourish, little discs of spring onion. I carefully closed the lid and placed the entire assembly, right side up, at the very top of my carry-on bag.
I drained the kettle and locked up. I walked into town, aiming the remaining spring onions like darts at various bins as I went. I missed with every single one.
There’s a little bakery on the pedestrian precinct. It’s all in French, obviously, and the people who work there are French people. From Europe. Ruddy feckless, insular, small minded, money grabbing Europeans. You know the type. None of them speak English. They could, but they don’t try.
“Hi, could I have a baguette, please”
“Certainly, which one would you like?”
“I don’t really mind – in fact could I just have half a baguette?”
“Of course.” Now she’s grabbed her knife and before I can say “left a bit, right a bit” she’s cut straight through.
“Any chance you could cut it lengthways, too, for a sandwich?” She’s holding the stick of bread in a suggestive manner, still wielding the knife in her other hand. She gives me tiniest wink and squeezes the bread a little. I give her a look that I hope lets her know I’m hung like a parliament but in fact simply betrays my flustered inadequacies. Smiling, she expertly runs the blade along the crust and opens it out some, closes it again and slips it in a thin white paper bag.
“That’ll be 40 cents, please”. I wave my debit card, struggling to refocus.
“Oh I’m very sorry, sir, I’m afraid there’s a minimum of a euro for card transactions.”
I know I have no coins. I have a 50 euro note in my wallet but I’m not breaking into that, not for a sandwich, despite the frisson of the entirely imagined sexual aspect of my encounter and anyway my wallet is somewhere deep below the magnificent ham & cheese creation, still in perfect order, that will soon be filling the loaf, and there’s no way I’m moving that before final assembly, which isn’t scheduled until I’m sitting on the train to the airport. The only option for a respectable traveller in these difficult moments is to pat all my pockets in an ostentatious self-frisking manoeuvre that leaves her in no doubt. The bread is cut. I’m holding it. We’re at an impasse. I’m starting to wonder whether I should offer to buy the rest of the baguette for 60c, thereby reaching the €1 threshold, but she turns around and takes down a tin from the shelf behind her. She pulls out 50c coin from her own tip jar and hands it to me. I hand it back to her, and she rings it up.
She hands me the change. I pop it back in the tin. We laugh. She’s already off getting a tray of mini pizzas out of the oven.