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till I then ripped off the beer crate barcode and handed it to the lady at the checkout forgetting
all about the TV guide underneath. While unpacking the trolley into the car I noticed my mis-
take but probably wouldn't have done anything about it had Samuel not been with me. Some
children are like the good angels that sit on the shoulder in
Tom and Jerry
cartoons and rather
than explain to my son that taking the magazine was actually a small victory and that Daddy
was 'sticking it to da man', it seemed easier and good parenting to go back, explain the error
and pay for the thing.
It wasn't.
'So, you stole the magazine and you've come back to tell me?' The assistant said, looking
over her glasses at me in time-honoured 'I'm going to condescend the hell out of you' fashion.
This wasn't going to plan. I explained again what had happened but through a combination of
poor French and her staggering disbelief that anyone would bother to own up to such a thing,
she simply wasn't having any of it. Even Samuel explained, in obviously better French than
mine, but it didn't change a thing; in fact, it just made things worse as she now regarded me
as some sort of Fagin figure, using small children as a cover for my grand larceny.
Eventually she let us go, though without the magazine, clearly feeling that flicking wildly
through TV channels without printed guidance was fair penance for our crime. It means that
I'm a marked man. Every time I go there now I am asked to open my empty shopping bags at
the till and to lift the beer crates to make sure that I'm not hiding anything underneath. They
say that it's now store policy and that they're not singling me out, but I'm not convinced. Even
new checkout assistants seem to know my reputation, it must be part of their training: they
get tested on various apple varieties, how to swipe the barcode on a bag of pasta and oh, if
you see this man, whereupon they'll be shown a grainy CCTV image of a mod, frisk him.
Frisk him good.
Just before Christmas last year they employed someone to dress up as
le Père Noël
and
wander around the shop with a microphone, asking customers a question which, if they got it
right, earned them a free gift. It was actually quite intimidating to some people who clearly
didn't want the fuss and he was given short shrift on a number of occasions. I found the whole
thing quite amusing, an old-fashioned approach that was doomed to failure as you simply do
not disturb the French when they're eating food or even, in this case, choosing it.
I didn't expect him to pick on me, but I was wrong. He cornered me near the tills one quiet
afternoon when I had popped in just to get a few things that I'd forgotten the day before.
'Bonne fête!'
he cried, a little too close for comfort and putting his hand on my trolley, a
definite no-no in my opinion.
'Monsieur, une petite question...'
I couldn't believe what he asked me: 'Who won the football World Cup in 1966?'
'Angleterre,'
I replied suspiciously.
'Oui, oui! Vous-avez gagné!'
he cried, and on this note of frenzy placed a child's stationery
set in my trolley! It's a set-up, I thought, they're actually planting evidence on me now! I
