I was queuing at the post office this morning.

Well, I would have been queuing if the French hadn’t abolished it in the Fifties and replaced it with ‘competitive huddling.’

To clarify: instead of the traditional one-behind-the-other business, the idea is that every new individual desirous of service, casually wanders up to the ‘queue’ and joins it somewhere at the side, until the ‘huddle’ becomes a sizable cluster. At which point, a cashier becomes available and whoever spots them first makes a sprint for the service hatch.

Leaving behind all the English people to stand there politely, fuming gently to each other about it until closing time.

In an earlier blog, I dimly recall promising that I would not slag at the French like typically intolerant Brits do when there are no teenagers around to criticise. I am now executing a shameless u-turn, obviously having forgotten the hell of the ‘competitive huddle’ when I wrote that drivel. 

However, if there happen to be any French citizens reading this… would you please also learn to drive properly as well.

Anyway, enough of this fun /cliched xenophobia/ enjoyable reminiscing.  And as I was plucking up the courage to bum-rush a seventy-year-old woman with a dog in a shopping bag clutching a postal order, I happened to spot a young English girl collecting a large cardboard box marked ‘URGENT’.

Now, I didn’t have to wander over and stick my nose into that box to know that (a) that would have been weird and perhaps even frightening for her and (b) that this girl was a brand new seasonnaire who had just received her first ‘Aid Package.’

Fact: even if you have chosen to live in the gastronomic epicentre of Europe, your parents will always assume that you will be unable to find anything suitable to eat.  Earthquake, homelessness, difficulties with language be damned: the most distressing fate a family-member can imagine for you is being without baked beans or PG Tips; Rickets and Scurvy a constant threat in this new and terrifying world of Michelin-starred restaurants, cafes, patisseries and local farmers’ markets.

Within a week of you having placed foot upon far-off soil  (i.e. Belgium) your parents they will frantically fill up two trolleys at Tesco and ship you an Aid Package that could easily feed a small village in Equatorial Guinea for some months.

It will without doubt contain the following: 1,369 Tea Bags (Tetley or PG), Marmite, Baked Beans, OXO cubes, mincemeat, sausages, tuna, tinned soup and a copy of the Daily Mail. Basically all the things you rejoiced over never having to touch again when you left England.

Depending on how hysterical your folks can get, you may also receive a life jacket, shot-gun cartridges, a reflective blanket, a glow-in-the-dark whistle and strong rope.

When I moved here in 2005, I remember my mum calling up and asking whether I needed ‘deodorant sent over’.

Me: ‘Mum, France is in the EU.’ 

Mum: ‘But you never know!’ she responded apprehensively, probably imagining that I was calling her from a satellite phone next to a Malaria hospital, as opposed to a mobile phone from a nice flat  next to a supermarket.

Me: ‘Ok, send me the deodorant. I’m off to watch TV.’

Mum: ‘You have that there then, do you?’

I haven’t told her they really, honestly eat horse yet. I’m saving that for when I need to be sent an emergency helicopter back to Blighty.