Trains and Turds

It takes me about 15 minutes to walk to Gare Lille Flandres to catch my train to work each morning. That walk has been dark, cold and tedious these last few months but, mercifully, I'm finding that I'm almost leaving the apartment in daylight this week. Obviously this was the state of things a year ago when I caught the train for my first day at the French office. I'd given myself a bit of breathing space between my arrival in France on Feb 22 and my starting work on Mar 1 but, with all the stuff that I needed to try to get sorted out, those days went by in a flash and I soon found myself walking hurriedly to the station, not knowing my arse from my elbow as regards from which platform my train would depart, would it be punctual, how long the journey would take, how many stops came before mine, would I be sure to get off at the right place, how long would it take to walk to the office at the other end? Etc. At least it wasn't raining.

Most people suffer the experience of the first day in a new job from time to time. It's rarely a relaxed or entirely pleasant experience and it’s often preceded by a restless night. This was certainly true in my case. Obviously, I've started new jobs before but nothing had ever come close to how I was feeling that morning. I’d been to the offices enough times to know that they were huge. I knew about 6 people of the 2000 in there and, among those 6, there was only one person whom I could claim to know well at all. Then, of course, there was the fact that I’d staked a whole lot on my being able to fit in, get on with the people who matter, understand the job, do the job, understand and communicate entirely in French and, of course, to continue to want to be there (and, of course, in France) indefinitely. As much as I’d thought long enough and hard enough about the decision a couple of months earlier, I think it was only that morning that the first realisation hit home to me in terms of the scale of the gamble I was taking. I didn’t have any reason to be sure I’d succeed in any of these respects, let alone in all of them and many more besides, which was precisely what I’d need to do and, of course, some of these issues would not be entirely in my own hands.

I think I'd given myself about 45 minutes for what I knew was only a 15 minute walk but, on days like that, you can't be too careful. What if I twisted my ankle on the cobbles? What if I witnessed a bank robbery and had to stop to give a statement? What if I had to help an old woman un-wedge her head from between some railings? What if I shat myself out of the sheer anxiety of it all and had to go “home” again? (as much as I liked the apartment, it hadn’t even begun to feel like home yet). No, again, you can't be too careful. As it was, my spare 30 minutes were spent reading and re-reading the screens in the station so as to be absolutely, totally, completely certain that the train I'd decided must be the one for me was not, in fact, going to Venice or Heckmondwike. I smoked 3 cigarettes in that 30 minute period too.

I finally boarded. At least it was quiet and tidy. What I’d heard about local French trains being so much nicer than their UK equivalents seemed to be very true. Seemed to be. Off we went and I switched from “get on the right train” mode to “get off at the right place” mode. I was focused. Even slightly calm. Then, of course, the ticket monkey arrived. I flashed my monthly ticket at him and, as much as my French was a whole year worse than it is now, I think he said something along the general lines of “Sir, I hate to be a stinker but would you mind fucking off out of the 1^st class carriage and into the cattle truck where you belong with all the rest of the plebeians, please? Thank you so much and, by the way, if you think you’re a special case just because you’re an English twat who’s too fucking stupid to read the 40cm-high number 1 which we paid good Euros to have painted onto the side of our lovely carriage, untarnished as it usually is by the presence of any filthy passengers, then think again, me old fruit. Have a nice day, now………. Shite-hawk”. Any ambiguity or hint of understanding which he’d intended to insert into his message was, I suspect, lost in the translation. I thought about embarking on the “It’s my first day…. I’m under a lot of pressure this morning……” kind of sheepish retort but I noticed a bulge in his satchel which was exactly the size and shape of the metal hat worn by John Cleese whilst he taunted King Arthur from the ramparts and, as the last thing I needed that morning was to have someone fart in my general direction etc, I decided to let it go. My calm was shattered, along with any illusions about the qualities of local French trains. As I traversed from one carriage to the next, my face as red as Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen with a nosebleed, it was like stepping off the Orient Express and onto Ivor the fucking Engine, complete with coal stains. The thought of this contrast reminds me. I must remember to revisit the subject of Roubaix College for Building Apprentices at some point as the charming students of that establishment make every morning’s trip on that train a veritable voyage of discovery and, as pacifistic as I am, I suspect that I may well find myself charged with the murders of several of them in the fullness of time so the least I can do is to offer some descriptive prose whilst I still have my liberty.

So I settle again, in Ivor, (so to speak) and the train begins to brake. It’s obviously going to make a stop but where? How many are there to go? From my armchair on the Orient Express, I could see clearly, through the pristine, Cristal D’Arq, engraved cut-glass windows, where I was in the World. Now, the hormones and ring tones seemed to provide an opacity which meant that I couldn’t see much at all, inside our outside the cattle truck. I was lucky. A chap behind me correctly interpreted my neck-craning and window-rubbing in my desperate attempt to establish the name of the station at which we’d now stopped. He asked me, in what sounded like the melody of very polite French, whether I needed any help. I asked if this was Roubaix. We’d been stationary for 2 minutes and the train was surely about to set off again. Again, in a soft tone of French, he assured me that Roubaix was the next stop. I thanked him very much and listened for the follow-up of his equivalent of “English Shitpot” or similar but it never came. Nice man.

He was as good as his word. As the train began to stop again, he tapped me on the shoulder and said “Roubaix, Monsieur”. Not wishing to say “Yes, my friend, I understand the complexities of the phenomenon of “the next stop””, I smiled and thanked him again. There I was. Roubaix. Damaged, bruised, emotionally-scarred by a 12-minute rail journey. As I alighted, I felt like Michael Palin, getting off the roof of something transcontinental after four days in the sun and dust. I wasn’t particularly calm any more but at least I was on the desired platform at the required time. Sorted.

Once I got out of the station, Roubaix was familiar enough to me after all the visits in the past. One big difference was that, as a sporadic visitor from England, staying at a nice enough hotel in Lille, nobody expects you to make any real effort or economy in relation to the trip to the office and back. I, like everyone else, used to get a taxi from Lille to Roubaix and the €23 bill, each way, was not an amount of money at all. It was simply a number, written on a receipt by a taxi driver. This is all fine and dandy in those circumstances but you try forking out €46 per day to get to work and back in the real world and, unless you’re paid significantly more than you’re worth, that approach would soon lose its appeal. So, as much as Roubaix was familiar, I’d never sought the offices from the railway station before but, as luck would have it, I asked the right person in the right way and was given clear and easy directions. The walk would only take me another 5 minutes.

That walk through Roubaix, as short as it was, was interesting and challenging. Interesting insomuch as I’d never seen as much canine excreta in one eyeful before and challenging insomuch as I’d never expected to have to do a solo foxtrot through the streets of a small French town so as to avoid presenting myself to a new team with dogshit on my lapels. I was like David Carradine as Kwai Chang Caine, trundling up and down the rice paper without getting a huge chunk stuck in his instep. I’ll possibly revisit the subject of dogshit in a later offering as its study is, I’m sure you’ll agree, of fairly universal interest.

I arrived at the office half an hour early that first morning……. with clean shoes.