22) A bus ride in France

Interior of a (very clean) French bus, Aurillac

Shortly before we visited England in March, we needed to get the car serviced.  I might have waited until we got back to the UK, but every time you started the engine, an irritating “binging” sound came on, together with an increasingly urgent red flashing message telling you the service was now overdue.  As the car’s warranty had run out three weeks earlier, I felt I really shouldn’t ignore this rather bossy Teutonic, but undoubtedly sensible, advice any longer (I also thought the “binging” sound might drive me mad).

Aurillac has the reputation of being the coldest town in France, but it happened to be the nearest place with an Audi dealer.  The garage was about two miles from the centre of town, in a sort of industrial zone.  Despite my having looked up the French for “courtesy car”, the garage seemed to regard this as something accorded only to Government Ministers, 5 star Generals and other such elevated personages.  As I was clearly neither a high ranking official, a famous footballer or even a champion boules player, there was no way they were going to give me a courtesy car, so instead we thought we'd take a bus into town.  I had been on buses in Rome (that’s another story), but neither Georgi nor I had been on a bus in France.

They were all very friendly, and it was immaculately clean.  First we asked an adolescent youth, who was hanging around the bus stop, which number we should take for the centre of town.  He didn’t seem to know, but as soon as we engaged him in polite conversation, he seemed very anxious to disengage himself from us.  I suspect he was either selling drugs and thought we were some sort of sneaky ploy the gendarmes had come up with to trap him, or perhaps he was just trying to keep up appearances of being streetwise and cool.  Engaging in conversation with an Audi owning, middle class, middle aged couple could, quite possibly, obliterate what little street cred he may have already acquired by loafing about menacingly in bus stops.  Of course, in reality, before he managed to get away, he was very polite, as all French kids are.  They seem to have a sort of reflex action if you speak to them.  They respond with politeness if not charm.  However surly or threatening they are trying to be, they just can't seem to throw off that universal (other than in Paris) French civility.

Then, when we got on the bus, a further good Samaritan came to our aid.  We paid for our tickets which were disgorged from a machine next to the driver.  We picked them up and started to walk down the bus.  Monsieur! the driver called out, and then she glared at us expectantly.  Les tickets, les tickets! she said, with a certain incredulity and even a note of panic.  Baffled, we looked blank (and, perhaps, rather British) as we began to feel the onset of a mild anxiety attack.  At this point a kind passenger who had noticed we were foreign, retarded, English, or simply clueless, pointed out that we had to put our tickets back in another machine, next to the first one, before taking our seats.

Having done this, Georgi and I walked sheepishly to the back of the bus.  On examining our tickets we discovered the second machine had stamped the time on them.  It appears the tickets only entitle you to a maximum of an hour on any one journey.  We presume that this is to prevent tramps from spending all day on the bus, just going round and round Aurillac (rather a draconian measure, given its reputation for coldness).  The more we thought about it, however, the more barmy the system of self-ticket stamping seemed.  Why didn’t the first machine simply print the time on the ticket?  Is there a fortune to be made here, developing an all-in-one-bus-ticket-issuing-machine?  Surely someone has already thought of this?  There must be something deeper behind all of this.  We haven’t worked it out yet, but I do wonder if Clouseau hasn’t had something to do with it?