16 - The Out-of-Towners

It's a question I'm often asked when people learn that I live in France, along with 'You must be fluent by now?', 'Why?' and 'What are the French like with you, because they hate us, don't they?' To which the answers in order are, don't be silly, don't be silly and don't be silly.

The answer to the wine question though is 'No', I do not 'know my wine'. I like wine and certainly since moving to the Touraine I have developed a taste for crisp, dry white wine to go with my only other previous wine preference of the catch-all 'a heavy Bordeaux'. I know nothing of grape, vintage, nose or assemblage. I am a happily ignorant amateur who occasionally stumbles upon a good wine (you know it's good because other people tell you it is) and has no idea how.

There is the myth of course that to find a good French wine you merely need to hang around the wine section of the supermarket long enough to see what the locals are buying, the logic being that they're French, they know what they're doing. It's a remarkable generalisation, a bit like saying that if you're not sure which firearm to purchase hang around the streets of Nottingham for a bit, or if you're unsure what shade of fake tan works best for the 'orange' look, visit Liverpool for the weekend. Not everybody in France knows about wine and loitering around the shop isn't always recommended anyway.

Natalie and the boys may get their fix from rescuing various animals and living the countryside to its flying, buzzing, itching extreme, but for me it's supermarkets. I have a weakness for French supermarkets, growing up they seemed incredibly exotic and offered far more in those days than their UK counterparts and though that is now the opposite (because you know, the English must have their kumquats in January) the love affair persists. Most of their products are now as ubiquitous in the UK as they are over here, for instance the local, world-famous goats' cheeses, the AOC Selles-sur-Cher and the AOC Valençay, are both readily available in most outof-town supermarkets in England these days, though obviously at four times the price. Also, the loyalty schemes offered in French supermarkets are largely derisory affairs and customer service begrudging at best, but maybe that's another reason why I like them.

I asked an assistant in our local Super U if they had any more gin, as there was none on the shelf. He looked at the shelf perplexed and then wandered off, I thought to see if there was any in the warehouse, but he never came back. I quite admire that attitude. As someone who was sacked from Tesco three times, the second time for guessing the prices (a pre-barcode world, kids!), I have an affinity for low-level supermarket employee truculence.

Up to a point, that is. Things have changed in our local Super U, 'progress' has reared its ugly head and it just doesn't feel right. The self-service till has become something of a comedy cliché in a very short space of time, with most comedians having their own variant on the 'unexpected item in the bagging area' line. I know. I'm one of them. But while the self-service till has become ubiquitous in UK shops it is a rare thing indeed in France, especially in rural backwaters like ours. Until recently, that is. My own view is that they are actually not providing the speed of service that they are supposed to and are just another way for people to avoid any sort of human interaction with each other. Granted, checkout tills are operated either by the very young, who grunt at you and avoid eye contact fearing that they will be aged immediately just by looking at you, or the retired who, in my experience, only work on supermarket tills so that they can be judgemental about your purchases and mutter about the modern world going 'to hell in a handcart'.

But I prefer both of those options to the smooth-voiced female bullying you to get on a self-service till, and if the argument is to cut down on the number of staff needed then that palpably doesn't work either. On the face of it, self-service tills are giving the customer a level of autonomy, we are being 'trusted' – well, if that's the case why are there so many 'customer service agents' hanging around like guard dogs in a junk yard looking at you suspiciously, ready to pounce? The supermarkets don't trust their own staff on the tills and they don't trust us on them either.

The thing about the UK though is that we put up with these things; comedians will make sarcastic remarks about them, columnists will write visceral caustic pieces too and people will by and large agree, but that's it. It's why we've never had a revolution.

The French on the other hand...

The proliferation of speed cameras in France, while acknowledged generally as a good thing because they may save lives, is also seen as an invasion of privacy; a sneaky, cowardly attempt at law enforcement, where the police state spies on the ordinary working man through remote technology, unfair and un-French. As a result, the roadside cameras around us are constantly having to be replaced following acts of vandalism by people who presumably still hanker for the old-fashioned gendarme jumping out of a bush at you, telling you to slow down, lay off the Cognac at lunchtime and that'll be €30, s'il vous plaît.

And these people, in all probability, are the ones who even now are gathering in the fresh produce section of the local supermarket muttering darkly about slippery slopes and thin ends of wedges.

And then it happened. The place shut on a Sunday lunchtime and re-opened on the Monday morning with a row of three shiny new self-service tills, only no-one went near them. It was a standoff. Despite being very busy, and only four tills being open, even customers with only one item preferred to wait behind other customers in the queue doing their weekly shop. Assistants were sent to speak to these people, to invite them to try out the new system and cajole them into breaking rank.

One old man reacted angrily by pointing out that he wasn't being paid to work on the till so why should he do all the work. The lady on the till was being paid, he said, gathering support for his cause, and he would not sentence her to unemployment by using 'your robots'. Other customers around him angrily voiced their support and clapped him on the shoulder, 'Bravo!' said one getting over-excited by the prospect of a bit of civil unrest.

In the first few days of their existence I didn't see anyone use them. Their shininess went unsullied and bagging areas were left without unidentified items as a war of attrition began to break out between old values and new ways. Slowly, though, as the supermarket realised that providing only one manned till at peak shopping times would do the trick, people began reluctantly to try the alternative. It was painful to watch. Previously proud and determined people started using the things sheepishly, avoiding eye contact with their comrades still queuing on the manned tills. The queues began to build on the new tills as friendships became strained in the community; one Parisian started berating the locals for taking too long on the self-service tills. 'This would never happen in Paris!' she said huffily, endearing herself to no-one. 'Go and do your shopping there then!' was the riposte.

In their first few weeks I saw one farmer punch a machine, people swear at the till's inability to realise that not everyone wants to put something in the bagging area and others just walk through without bothering to scan anything at all. They had to employ a security guard to stand with an assistant and install electronic gates that another assistant would release assuming the till had finished bullying you.

My guess is that these machines will go the same way as the local speed traps; some latter day Luddite will sneak up on one from behind, throw a bag over its head and beat it brutally with a big stick. The machine will fall, like a soured symbol of modernity and whine dolefully, 'Did you use your own bag?'

Anyway, it hasn't put me off. I am still in the supermarket a lot, partly because I like it and partly because having three growing boys at home is like catering for a plague of locusts, not to mention the dog food, cat food, horse food and wine stocks. As a result I'm there pretty much all the time and clearly therefore, not to be trusted. The fact that I'm there nearly every day and that I'm a man has apparently set some alarm bells ringing. Quite a lot of men actually stay in their cars and let their wives do the shopping, only emerging from the car in a cloud of Gauloises smoke to pack the boot and get their trolley euro back, they certainly don't do all the shopping themselves and dress as a 1960s English dandy. As a result, everybody who works in the supermarket thinks I'm up to no good.

It all stemmed from an incident a couple of years ago. I had picked up a television guide, moved on to the beer section and then placed a crate of beer on top of the magazine. At the 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 mistake 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.

'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 looked around nervously, waiting to see if les flics (the cops) were hiding behind the piled-up Christmas bûches de Noël and seasonal tins of marrons. They weren't, but still I felt uneasy going through the till, even though I explained with the help of Father Christmas why I wasn't paying for the stationery set.

It's all conspired to make me rather nervous about the place, and certainly if my intention one day was just to observe people and their purchases in the wine section I really think they'd ask me to leave. And really, is that the best way to buy wine? Just because a Frenchman likes it? They're French, they will, all of them, give the impression that they know their stuff; it's ingrained in the national character and good for them. I have never, in the years I've lived here, heard a French person admit to lacking in knowledge about wine and they are also fiercely patriotic about it too. Our local supermarket has until recently only stocked French wine choosing to ignore that there may even be others; it has now begrudgingly started stocking Lambrini as if to say, 'Look, this is the muck the others are making. Plebs.'

Following a local around the wine department presupposes that that person has good taste and not everybody has, and they are also sold on this myth themselves. I was in the supermarket one quiet Monday lunchtime, and as usual dressed more for a late-night Central London mod 'all-nighter' than shopping with farmers, and I noticed that I was being followed. Now obviously this isn't entirely unusual in the supermarket as they have it in their heads that I am a rampant shoplifter, but this wasn't an employee, this was a local and I could tell that she was checking out what wines I was looking at and then picking up the same ones. I played up to it for a while (and I hope she liked her selection) but really she would have been very disappointed by my wine-choice criteria.

I was looking for wines with rude names.

Look, what else have I got to go on? Like I said, I don't know about grapes or what was a good year; rude names are a starting point, that's all. I found a beauty, a red from the Languedoc-Roussillon region called Seigneur d'Arse, literally the Lord of Arse. I bought a couple of bottles, thinking that any more would open me up to claims of immaturity, fully intending to go back for a couple of cases later. Unfortunately, even later that day, they'd sold out, clearly to some other expat using the same childish wine selection technique as me.

I gave a bottle of Seigneur d'Arse to my friend and fellow comedian Paul Thorne, who is not only as puerile as I am but also considers himself to be something of a wine aficionado. Again, I haven't the knowledge to contradict him on this, but it seems his expertise manifests itself by asking 'What shiraz do you have?' then swilling the stuff around his mouth and declaring it to be 'metallic'.

Paul came out to stay while Natalie and the boys were away in England and the idea was to do a fair bit of wine-tasting – unfortunately things didn't quite go to plan. Like the rest of France I was under the weather as, according to the newspapers, we were in the grip of a gastric flu epidemic; Paul was walking into a germ factory and it didn't take long for the symptoms to make themselves abundantly clear. Both Paul and I have worked in India a lot, after the London Comedy Store opened a franchise there, and the anti-diarrhoea drug of choice is Smecta, a vile clay powder-like substance that as far I can tell simply builds a wall inside you and stops anything from coming out. It's effective if you take it regularly, but hardly conducive to a wine-tasting road trip and we decided to limit ourselves as sensibly as we could.

Sancerre is about an hour and a half away from home and seemed a 'reasonable' distance to travel bearing physical frailties in mind, Pouilly-sur-Loire would be an extra twenty minutes or so but worth it to go to the renowned Chateau de Tracy and sample their Pouilly Fumé. So, though neither of us felt particularly well, we Smecta-d ourselves up and hit the road. It was a glorious crisp late winter's day and the countryside around Sancerre was simply stunning, it's much hillier than where we are, the green and brown forests on the hillside were breathtaking and occasionally the turrets of small chateaux would poke through the budding, very early spring colours, giving a hint at their hidden grandeur.

We reached the Chateau de Tracy just as they opened for the afternoon. We hadn't risked much of a lunch and though both of us were keen to taste the wine, we were feeling pretty rough by the time we arrived. We waited in the cellar to be served, both our stomachs gurgling mercilessly and the sound echoing off the chilled underground walls.

'You do the talking,' Paul said.

'Why? You know wine! All you need is the word metallique.'

'Because you're "fluent",' he said, sarcastically. Our stomachs gave a big heave-ho in unison just as a small woman approached.

'Messieurs, bonjour, vous-connaissez notre vin?'

'Er, non.' I replied, hoping I'd heard her correctly over the gastric cacophony.

'See? Fluent,' Paul said, smirking.

Despite not being in the best shape for a wine-tasting, what followed was sublime. Let me repeat that I know nothing about wine or viticulture, but the four wines we tasted were magnificent, each very different and each going up in price but, and I've never felt this way about wine before, the price was immaterial. The wines were superb and we bought bottles of each, not wanting to leave any behind. I've been wine-tasting before with Paul and he's convinced that we were robbed last time and that the wine we'd sampled wasn't the wine we were given to take away, but even his suspicious nature was quelled by what we had just tasted and although we had intended to try other vignerons, both of us felt that anywhere else would have been a step down that afternoon and we raced home before the Smecta ran out.

We sat in the kitchen later that evening feeling pretty pleased with ourselves, that despite our gastric handicap we'd ventured out and had a really good day. I swilled my glass around, sniffed the contents and swallowed some of the liquid.