Spent some considerable time this morning waiting my turn at the Post Office, in order to pay in a cheque. Nearly all public service departments here run on a ticket system, and you have to get a little coupon with your number on it from a machine. Then a luminous notice board indicates when it is your turn, and which counter to go to. All fair, one might think, but not everybody, and particularly not North African immigrants of a certain age, can read. These unfortunate people were really stressed out, staring despairingly and uncomprehendingly at the notice board and their ticket. Sure that their turn had been taken by somebody literate, which it probably had.
It reminds me of our trip to the Sous Préfecture at Grasse, last week, where I started the process of becoming a legal driver again, after Swansea's cock up. The same ticket system, but this time supplied in the kind of giant bog rolls you now get in motorway toilets. In the motorway bogs, the rolls are frequently missing, just when you need them. Ditto at the Sous Préfecture. However, help was on hand, and a strong lady came laden with new supplies. The wait was in proportion to the length of the roll: who says size doesn't matter? I couldn't help noticing another of those artfully stuck yellow stripes on the same dreary tiling I'd seen in the CPAM. This time it was furnished with a different legend - ligne de discretion. What it really meant, I think, was that people filling in forms or cheques at the counter had a right not to have the next customer after them staring over their shoulder. Needless to say, the yellow line had little dissuasive effect.
These places are timeless, in the original meaning of the term. Somehow once inside time has no dominion, even though there are occasional whiffs of air and echoes of sound from outside in the real world. I could imagine writing a short story, apparently hyper-realist, about people waiting in one of these stale, uniformly grey outposts of the state, each anxious for their turn and worried both about queue jumping and the adequacy of their documentation once they reach the counter. Only at the end of the story would a few well placed mythological hints demonstrate that this was the antechamber to the underworld, where the dead dawdle, waiting for Charon's announcement of their turn to cross the Styx.
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