The tragic tale of the man who was caught short

Now I wouldn’t like you to sit there thinking that schoolboy lavatory humour is something I really should have grown out of by now, but the French can be very Benny Hill about these things, and they had another chuckle about another Breton ‘pipi’ incident that made the inside pages of our press last week. Tragi-comic this story is, though.

Yes, this 30-year old had been having more than a few pastis or whatever with his mates last week when he decided he just had to ‘go’, but out of the window, for some reason. Don’t ask me why: my own interest in this story only goes so far.

Anyway, it seems he was standing there, swaying gently in the breeze, when he toppled out, which even I might find mildly amusing, I suppose.

Only he was in his second-floor flat at the time, and fell 22 feet to the pavement below. And they said on the radio this morning that he’d never regained consciousness when the nurses finally pulled the white sheet over his face last night.

IN Vannes, this happened, down on Brittany’s southern coast and probably the only place in France that Mme Masstairmann and I would even consider leaving Dinan for.

Well, for a start it’s on the coast and we’re 25 kilometres up the Rance Valley. Then their weather’s just that bit better than ours, too, just like Jersey’s is compared with the UK.

It is five times bigger than Dinan, but that still only means a population of 55,000, so we’re still talking town rather than city, and its beautiful intramuros has survived the centuries unscathed. Even in the Second World War only one bomb fell there, and that didn’t go off.

Come to think of it, this is May and we’re in full bank holiday season over here, so Mme M and I might even pop down there for a long weekend sometime because we’ve also got a lot of ‘ponts’ or bridges this year, too. (That’s what the French call it when a national day off falls on a Tuesday or Thursday and you take the Monday or Friday off as well to make a decent break of it.)

The first of May fell on a Tuesday, as did 8 May, France’s Liberation Day, only they call it the Fête de la Victoire, so that’s two four-day weekends for a start. Then Thursday 17 May is Ascension Day, so that’s another one. But the week starting 21 May will be bleak because we don’t get anything off at all then, so we’ll just have to labour on until Pentecost on Monday the 28th before another extended breather, if only for three days this time.

Then, for teachers like Mme M and me, it’s noses solidly bac to the grindstone until the end of June and the ten-week summer break.

Mind you, sometimes the calendar can be really cruel, like 2010 and 2011, when 1 and 8 May fell on the weekend and you don’t get anything at all when that happens, not that I’m expecting much sympathy from you, of course.

WE do need a break, though. Well, we are campaign-weary after months of 24/7 presidential electioneering during which the main candidates have consistently and carefully avoided telling us how they intend to deal with anything that we’re really concerned about, like the domino effects of the Europe’s economic meltdown, f’rinstance.

Good Lord – one of them was even saying that if he gets in, he’ll order municipal swimming pools to introduce special sessions open only to those larger ladies who feel too self-conscious about their weight to go for a splash at a regular one. I turned to La Patronne and said, ‘It’s not April the First, is it?’

NOT that I’ve got anything against the larger lady being able to have a discreet dip, don’t get me wrong, but shouldn’t they be discussing the more urgent, more painful election issues like the acute shortage of affordable housing, chronic unemployment or the rising cost of living?

I know it’s only one indicator, but pawn shops have been doing more trade than at any time since 1970. And compared with the same period last year, the value of the objects entrusted to the safekeeping of ‘Ma Tante’ (my aunt) in the first quarter of 2012 is up 75 per cent and the number of items rose by 40 per cent.

A litre of ordinary petrol will now set you back 1.66 euros on average, though it can be as high as 2.06 in your back-street two-pumper in central Paris.

Down in Vannes again, one Leclerc supermarket had to call off a one-euro-a-litre special offer when the queue of motorists prepared to wait two hours to fill up stretched one and a half kilometres back out from the forecourt, down the road and up onto the Nantes-Quimper expressway.

But petrol consumption is actually dropping because the French are driving less – 12,790 kilometres a year now compared to 14,000 in 2001 – and more slowly, or car-sharing. And it’s hitting social mobility, too, as people juggle with the comparative costs involved in perhaps moving to a better-paid job but further from home or to a cheaper place but somewhere out in the sticks.

One of my colleagues (a nice lady she is, despite being a maths teacher) lives down the road in Rennes, so that’s a 100-kilometre round trip very day, five days a week, which means a 75-euro full tank just for getting to work and back. Her husband works the same distance on the other side of the Breton capital, so they’re looking at a monthly petrol bill of 600 euros, just for starters.

Repairing and maintaining a car costs a darn sight more here than in neighbouring countries, too. In fact, garage bills have soared by a third since 2000 and that’s essentially down to the manufacturers abusing their nationwide monopoly on their own spare parts.

Actually, don’t tell her I told you whatever you do, but Mme M totalled a wing mirror last year and what I magnanimously told her would only cost ‘quatre sous’ to replace ended up setting us back 150 euros, and then some.

Yes, our car’s bright shiny blue, not grim battleship grey, I told the man at Renault when he gave me the new one.

Exactement, monsieur! It’s been specially primed so you can choose any shade you want from our exciting new range of colours, then go round to our body shop and get it sprayed.

‘And is that included in the 150?’ I wondered out loud, rather fearing that I already knew the answer to that, and got the sort of patient smile you’d give a not very bright child.

So it’s hardly surprising that by the time you factor everything else in, too – buying your car, then depreciation, insurance, ‘contrôles techniques’ or MOTs, and so on – the average vehicle in France is now costing its driver around 50 centimes a kilometre. Multiply that by the 13,000 km a year I was talking about and, well, it’s almost enough to drive you to drink, isn’t it, but not enough to risk exposing yourself to the kind of misadventure that befell that chap in Chapter One above, I hope.

Everything in moderation, eh? Even moderation, of course. Kenavo!