In the morning during the last seven minutes of my final tennis lesson this season I managed to put my face between the ball and my partner's racquet during some volley practice. My instructor may be some regional champion but he's a right grunter when he hits a ball over the net to me and aside from making me party to a side of him that only his wife should get to hear, his sex noises put me right off my stroke. I left, my normal shade of tomato (why on earth I put myself through this weekly humiliation of being the dolt of the tennis club, I don't know - it's not like I'm ever going to make Roland Garros unless they have a Passed-It-Housewives category) and spent the rest of the morning checking if my front teeth were about to fall out and whether I was looking any less like a post-collagen Leslie Ash who'd badly applied her Maybe-it's-Maybelline-Permanent-Lip-Stain-Lipstick.
As if this was not enough pain for one day, I spent the afternoon trying to break through the blockades at L'Eclerc to try and refill my empty fridge and store cupboard. Jeesh.
Rocked up to do my weekly shop only to find every single entrance was barred by angry farmers who'd up-ended the trolleys (some had taken the wheels off them, Longleat monkey destruction style) and parked their tractors to make a mean metal perimeter. Having spent the morning at the nearby dairy in Créhen burning tyres outside and handing out pilfered slabs of cheese they'd looted from inside, the farmers were still clearly high from fumes and euphoria of their successful morning protests and adamant that no-one was getting through; nope, not even one really furious bloke who rammed their trolley line with his Clio would deter them.
As I circled the bases, thinking only of my empty fridge, I drew up alongside one picket line and made up some cock and bull story about how I had to pick up some wood from Mr Bricolage in an attempt to get in and parked and secretly slide into the adjacent supermarket to get my shopping. As I was filled in on the pitiful details of why they had scrawled "Voleur" over all the L'Eclerc signs, I caught sight of the gimlets in the eyes of other hard-done-by herdsmen and dairy farmers and had second thoughts. And visions of me being pelted by a shower of trolley wheels and shouts of "Croute" (unsure whether 'scab' would be so directly translated under the circumstances) as I strolled back to my car, pushing my trolley full of groceries and whistling nonchalantly, blatantly having cocked a snook at their plight. Mmm. Maybe not.
Instead I ended up in Carrefour which was heaving with similarly die-hard yet disorientated shoppers, unsure of the aisle layout and mentally price-checking each item with what they would usually pay back in L'Eclerc. Carrefour had taken on the air of a Russian grocery store circa 1970; empty shelves, no fresh dairy produce, only nasty carbs and pink wafer biscuits in plentiful supply. Entirely depressing. Unlike back at L'Eclerc where five 1000 litre milk tankers ominously rolled up at the by-now eerily empty parking lot. Incidentally in my mind I like to see the owners of the parked cars running to their vehicles, hands raised and squealing, in a kind of imminent Godzilla attack style as the tankers are spotted rolling round the roundabout, but I'm probably asking too much of the laissez faire Frenchies to make this a reality. Then, and this is where it gets really quite 'citing and why it is worth paying dues to belong to a union, the picket lines pushed aside their trolley barricades (no doubt regretting taking the wheels off as they're probably quite heavy and immovable without them, the bottoms catching and grating on the tarmac), the tankers parked up and promptedly disgorged 5000 litres of fresh milk to make one huge white puddle in the empty parking lot. Wowsy.
I'm thinking that if this warm weather and the farmers' schutzpah holds, I reckon in three days' time it'll probably make quite good yoghurt. And I, armed with my growing boys, some sachets of sugar and a teaspoon each will be making a bee line down there to scrape it up in our craws. That is if we're not too weak and brittle-boned by that stage. This whole situation of supermarkets charging 1€ for a litre of milk to the consumer and giving only 0.30c to the farmer has to change. If I'm going to sign on to tennis again in September, a high intake of calcium-rich foods in the summer break is key. I need to make sure my teeth are super-resilient to future shocks.
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