A horrible time in Calais

This is the first time we have had cold wet weather.  We arrive at the Budget Ibis hotel in a suburb of Calais called Coquelles.  The hotel car park is chocablock full of police vehicles of all kinds, paddywagons and riot control vans amongst them.  I surmise it’s a kind of reservoir in case of big refugee trouble. Calais is the home of “the jungle” where unfortunate people are trying to get across the Channel to England.  I think that of all places to be stuck this is the beastliest.  The damp, the flatness and the way the grey sea dissolves into a mist where the horizon should be.

I actually like our budget room, soothingly free of personality and so sparse it is impossible to lose anything.  Unlike me Grant is in rather good spirits.  Calais is host to two huge supermarkets, Carrefours and Auchan.  They are bloated for a reason.  The English come over on day trips to do French shopping.  Grant loves supermarkets. “They are the museums of the future” he argues. Huh.  We have nothing to buy but for some inexplicable reason he wants to buy a frying pan.  “We were given two by the boys when we rebuilt the kitchen.  “What about a toilet brush, it’s lighter.” I suggest. “But we have a perfectly good toilet brush.”  It’s hopeless.  I leave him in the long long frying pan aisle and wander off to try and improve my French by reading labels. “Rongeur poison” in the gardening aisle. What kind of thing could a rongeur be now? I wonder if I need some.

I think how lifeless produce becomes in supermarkets.  The little pink and white radishes that teased the eye pleasingly in the Rue de Lilas market lose their spirit under the harsh neon lights of the hypermarche. After a bit I decide enough is enough. I want to get out of this place. I decide to use a ploy that always works in Australia.  I go to the service desk and explain in halting and pathetic French that I have lost mon mari and ask what can I do? The friendly lady says she can call him on the loudspeaker but, she gestures with a wave, it only works in here, and points - not out there.  “He’s in there” I say darkly.  “What is his name?” “Grant Mack Call” I say with a French accent hoping to make it easier to pronounce.  A stream of French adds itself to the tinkle of the musak as he is summoned.  I am not convinced. “Can you do it in English?”  She assents willingly and I teach “Would Grant McCall (proper pronunciation this time come to the information desk”  After a couple of practice runs she picks up the microphone but she must have lost her nerve because the announcement comes out in French.  It works though as it always does. (Except in Ikea where they won’t cooperate unless it’s a code 8 emergency.  Tell me what it is and I’ll cause it, I said, but they wouldn’t.)  The delightful thing about this retrieval strategy is that all the anger at being called in this embarrassing way is subconsciously directed at the authoritarian supermarket and not the instigator of the call.  And there’s no comfortable way of staying on in the supermarket after being called in that way.  And Grant seems resigned to not exploring the rival supermarket, Auchan.  Plus no frying pan.   I’m on a winning streak.

By this time I am hungry.  It’s another of our incompatibilities.  I can’t face breakfast and Grant , because he has a big one, doesn’t eat lunch and seems to regard the need for it as a moral weakness.  Anyway, we cruise the bleak streets of Calais for a possibility but everything is shut except except the friteries, shops dedicated to the production of chips with a few half hearted kebabs available on demand.  Actually a chip or two would go down a treat, I think and we stop and order a medium serve for me.  Grant orders a shish kebab which comes wrapped in a cylinder of tin foil squeezed tight at the ends.  Together with my chips in a polystyrene box, it is bundled into a paper bag with two tiny green forks and we go to the car to get out of he rain.  I begin on my chips but they are really bad.  They taste like old boiled potatoes that have been fried up.  Grant asks for his kebab and I squeeze too hard when handing it to him so a stream of oil lands in his face. I was horrified but I couldn’t help laughing.  There’s  Graham Greene short story about this situation.  A young man’s mother is killed by a pig falling on her when the Italian balcony it was kept on collapsed.  He can never find a wife because every time he tells a girlfriend about the tragedy she laughs.The girls know it’s terrible but they can’t help laughing.  So it was with me.  Grant is very very angry and wreaks the only revenge that matches the insult.  He drives to the other huge supermarket Auchan and leaves me in the car as he stalks in.  I pass the time (endless) reading the latest Julian Barnes novel on my phone.  It’s about Shostokovich and the cultural revolution and I’m not enjoying it as much as I should.  Grant comes back much mellowed in the fullness of time with a frying pan, a saucepan and some charcuterie and we repair to the Ibis to crack a bottle of wine and forget Calais.

Just had breakfast.  Thought I’d better after yesterday.  I was the only woman in the cafeteria . Everyone else except Grant is a policeman in mufti but with a gun peeping out from his waistline.  I ask in what looks to be an incident room in the room next to ours. “Is this a police station?”  One guy nods and one shakes his head ”Non non”.  Ah well, why should policemen be more startling than say, travelling salesmen, as co-residents?  I suppose it’s just their reason for being that makes their presence  a bit chilling.

On to England now and Brexit , which I learn is being whipped up into a nasty racist debate.  If Turkey gets into the EU all sorts of extremists and rapists will come sneaking across the Channel and Britain would best be out of it.  Alas if it were only that simple.  A home grown American has just mown down fifty odd people in a nightclub in the name of Allah.  What a world.