muscat ruth

Carpentras was hot and jammed in the midday rush for lunch - Insurance salesmen and shop-owners alike screeching round the ring-road bent on getting a good hour of the wife's poulet basquais, cassoulet or lamb tagine, and wives rushing to prepare. I too had a mission. I was off to Leclerc to COMPLAIN.

A year ago Julian scraped along a concrete barrier in the newlook million euro facelift Leclerc petrol station. The barrier - haut comme trois pommes, as they say, (except in this case it was probably a little shorter but thank you gail for this delectable phrase)- was indicated by a white line and was impossible to see from the driver's seat. Judging by the rainbow of car-coloured graffiti we were clearly not the first victims.

I had pulled a superb provencal rant, ejecting the pasty 'responsable' out of her anonymous floral product-smelling office into the driver's seat of our car. Then I had asked her if she could see the white line. She had said no and, as if at last being able to confide in someone, had practically sobbed to me that the whole thing was a crap design.

The next day bright orange party bollards appeared on the concrete shoulders and a week later they were upgraded to white ones with silver stripes for extra vision. Clearly Messsrs Leclerc knew they had made a boo-boo.

...but would they admit it to the insurance? NO. We got sweet FA.

Six months later, our car still scarred to the tune of €500 (for who would want to give up twenty years no claims for that?), I wrote a letter. A really good one. I had had no response and I wanted one.

"C'est quoi, votre relation avec vos clients?" I hotly quizzed the new ginger directeur. "We haven't shopped here for a year and we never will again if you don't f...." etc etc, I ranted on. But then something weird happened. I realised he was listening to me and he seemed almost concerned.

Possibly, he might look into it. He was perhaps an exception.

This would never happen in America, where the customer is always right even if they're wrong, or in the UK where they're right if they're right ....what is it about France and customer relations? They haven't got a bloody clue.

Anyway. Point of story being:

All day I have been grappling with the SNCF, Grand Voyageur, Frequence Plus, Axa assurance, Assedic, the npu, the pmnu the punch me in the face, why don't you, and rob me too you f***ing arse cos you clearly couldn't give a damd.... and I have been breathing on the edge of rasping anger.

How to get back to Zen?

Lending my mobile phone to a woman in the post office who was in distress didn't help much. (I just thought how marvellous a person I was and how crap Leclerc were in comparison)

Giving a lift round the ring road to a shopper on foot who had to catch the last post and couldn't run fast enough. (ditto)

Coming home and walking the vine circuit, watching the pickers - brown of limb and bald of head - peeking here and there between the blueblack clusters; the crates full of muscat grapes ready to be loaded on to the little red truck, and feeling the sun sweeten my insides like a grape.....

Yep. That did it.

Muscat Ruth.