Signed, Sealed, Delivered

Françoise in all her glory.

I wish to devote this post to the way in which I win my bread.  Twice a week for the past six months I have been mastering the art of delivery in the back-streets of Bordeaux.  Now, it’s all too easy to glorify the work of a delivery man: he is a porteur du pain, a bringer of bread, a feeder of the world.  It’s in giving food to others that he himself is fed.  It has even been claimed that Tesco Direct can trace its foundation back to the revolutionary work of Jesus’ disciples as detailed in Matthew 14:19 (“Taking the five loaves and the two fish… he gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people.”).  But if we are to discover the real nature of delivery work, we must pass beyond this glamour and romance.

When I, le livreur, arrive at a client’s door, I am sweaty.  This is to be expected, seeing as I have likely just parked illegally, negotiated multiple auto-locking doors, run up several flights of stairs, and groped for the corridor’s light switch, all with a family’s weekly shop clutched to my breast.  I do sometimes worry that the appeal of organic vegetables might be diminished by their being attached to a panting foreigner, but needs must.  The physical challenge posed by a delivery is such that I sometimes think myself to have fallen into a sub-par episode of Gladiators; there’s no Ulrika Jonsson, but I do have a client who looks remarkably like Wolf.

Second to these domestic challenges, the next biggest barrier to a successful shift is transport.   The French have a nasty habit of driving on the right, whereas my brain tends to adhere to the Britannic school of motoring.  This culture clash made the negotiation of my first roundabout rather memorable; both for me, and for the French gentleman I nearly killed.  I’ve since found a simple yet effective solution¹, and now consider myself positively European when in the cockpit of my van; I hardly ever swerve to the left, and have even been known to gesticulate angrily at stationary traffic.

I believe my boss to have noticed some of these British quirks when I joined the company, as I spent my first few shifts driving not one of the brand-new refrigerated Peugeot vans, but rather driving Françoise.  Françoise is a 1985 Renault Express who lacks power steering and functional indicators but who is gifted with a ‘choke’ and persistent smell of garlic.  Had she been human, one would likely have seen Françoise gulping cognac in a run-down Bordelais bistro.  Her face, lit by the light of a Gauloise, would crumple as she coughed up filthy joke after filthy joke, till eventually she’d lose her temper and throw a punch at a passer-by.  In short, Françoise was a shit.  The extent of her shittiness, however, was to remain unknown until the middle of a particularly difficult shift.  I had managed to get to the first five-or-so clients despite Françoise’s usual ploy of refusing to breach 25km/h.  I ran back from the fifth client’s house, very conscious that time was a ticking.  I jumped into the driver’s seat, thrust the key into the ignition, turned my wrist, and, nothing.  I tried again.  She spluttered, then nothing.  And again.  Nothing.  And so it was that Françoise point-blank refused to budge in the middle of my most stressful delivery round to date.  A lot of very hurtful things were said between us that evening under the setting sun, and, as I loaded my cargo into the rescue vehicle, I knew that things would never again be the same between us.  Indeed, it was the last time I ever worked with Françoise.  I’ve since been working with a much younger model, Delphine, who, despite her graceful curves, has never quite filled the spot of my garlicked drunkard.

When I do manage to arrive at a client’s door, the exchange that follows can be quite fascinating.  It’s not often we invite strangers into the heart of our homes in the way we do deliverymen.  Understandably, new clients are often put on edge by this foreign presence; the exchange of goods and payment tends to be clumsy and inefficient as the deliverer tries to help without imposing himself, and the client tries to receive help without losing control.  With practice, however, these exchanges can become quite beautiful².  After weeks of rehearsal, each party has matured into his role and the client-livreur relationship flourishes.  The exchange of goods for a pre-prepared cheque becomes almost balletic in its efficiency; there’s one client who each week I see for 15 seconds before I am once again on my way.  But, for every ying there is a yang.  For every super-efficient client I have the pleasure of working with, there is an equally inefficient client who, week-in week-out, makes me contemplate suicide.  Or, at least, homicide.  Some clients like nothing better than to play hide and seek with their chequebook.  Others believe that I am out to short-change them, and so are careful to count every last sprig of thyme before paying.  No, Madame, of course I don’t mind you weighing your box of watercress.  Really, Madame?  There’s 500g?  Goodness!  That’s exactly the amount you ordered, you say? Well isn’t that a stroke of bloody luck?

It’s always important to respect the professional nature of a client-deliverer relationship, especially in France, where professionalism is a cult.  Children, however, often do not share this passion with their parents.  On one occasion, I was thanking a lady for her continued custom when her four year old daughter beamed at me: “Would Monsieur like to sit down and have a cup of tea with us?”  I saw her mother’s eyes fill first with amusement at the prospect of a delivery boy coming round for tea, and then with marked panic, as she remembered that this delivery boy was English and might well take up the offer.  Unfortunately, I was running behind, and so had to decline.  On a different occasion, a young boy plucked up the courage to offer me a carton of juice as I unloaded the artichokes onto the kitchen table.  Again not wanting to impose, I politely declined.  From the hurt in that boy's eyes you'd have thought I'd just shot the family pet, not turned down a Fruit Shoot.  Indeed, he was so scarred by my attempt at professionalism that he no longer acknowledges my presence on a Wednesday evening.  It would seem that the French nation’s professionalism is born of nurture and not nature.

So there you have it; my daily bread.  Granted, it's more white-sliced than organic-granary, but it strengthens the heart nevertheless.         

   

                                                                                                                                                                   

1. A heartfelt Hail Mary followed by a decade of ‘Drive on the right, or you will die’ tends to do the trick.
2. Beautiful for a delivery-connoisseur, that is, much as a bacterium might be beautiful to a molecular biologist, or a well cleaned toilet to a toilet attendant.  I’m afraid it’s almost certain you wouldn’t find my deliveries beautiful.