Moving things

It’s always very varied here.

The heat adds to things. We had a van with broken Aircon so of course it fell to me to drive it back to the van rental and change it over. Oven on wheels. You can’t have two vehicles in your name at the van rental at the same time, so the fact that I do is an absolute triumph for dyslexia. I had no pride so when my name was mangled by the first place I kinda just let it slide. The manager of the second place was very much the cliché of Monsieur clean shaven disapproval francais. He wouldn’t allow Kieron to rent because he only had a photo of his licence. He honestly would have been happier if he could block us than if he could solve it. I was there to solve it and solved it by having had the Dacia allocated to me on a dyslexic spelling of my name, and knowing it, and using a different address. He checked name and address multiple times as I had told him I already had a vehicle with his company when I was trying to overcome the photo thing : “The branch at gare du nord were fine with a photo of my licence” He seemed disappointed and upset not to have worked out how to obstruct me. Thankfully he didn’t check driving licence number – I almost thought he would. Too lazy to input it all. So I’ve got two vehicles with the same company, neither of which will actually be driven by me. We are all insured, sure. Even beyond the company I always have full full shiny comprehensive I do drivething insurance. Just broke the rules about multiple cars. I could have probably solved it slowly and less fraudulently. But I saw a fix, saw a prick, and used the fix to bypass the prick. Fraud, ladies and gents. But to overcome an obstructive ponce who wouldn’t let it go in kierons name despite a passport and a photo of his licence. Needed the real thing? No. Kieron was English. The guy was a prime example of the well turned out French racist.

As an Englishman in Paris, surrounded by English in Paris, I have really started to notice something cultural. It is hard to put your finger on, it is insipid. But… the more French you speak the easier they make it for you… But even within that, they want to make it harder for the English wherever possible. When I first hit it was with Roadkill and Bob at GPL. Even with communicable French they were more interested in making things hard for me than helping, because Bob had met me the day before and they had constructed this whole “Bad English people shouldn’t be involved” narrative. Because, as Bardot told us, Le Diable est Anglais. Most sane English people would never be able to countenance how the French don’t like us, because we largely think of them as being cool well turned out humans who eat well and are a bit too chilled out for our purposes. Bob was at the warehouse the other day. “BOB!” I said, about a foot from his ear. He ignored me so hard it could be heard in Sweden. Ponce.

French people running venues are deliberately failing to find solutions when it is an English team without accreditation trying to deliver, even though the accreditation fuck up was pretty much universally French. Some people are more interested in culture war than making this mad great big thing work. It’s tempting though, isn’t it. “We need this bungee to work. This bungee is just the other side of the fence in a van with two people anxious to deliver it. The English haven’t got a working pass and neither of them speak our language (we sent Scott and Mel). If we don’t solve it we still get paid and we don’t have to work so hard today and we can blame falling behind on the English. Let’s all go get a pasty.”

Idiots. But my French has woken up now. I’m partly thinking in it. With simple communication it is now easy for me to bypass the racism by appearing to be French. Anything more than a sentence or two and I’ll be exposed, but when they ask me in French where I’m from, I tell them I’m Spanish cos it’s half true and they don’t hate the Spanish like they hate UK. None of the people I’ve done that with so far have switched to Spanish, but it wouldn’t faze me if they did, I’d likely just switch to English as the universal. Which it is, guys. Deal with it.