French Letter: The gendarmes were asleep but Casino gets the message

Last week, the front of Casino, the smaller of Callac’s two supermarkets, was daubed with graffiti alleging that its staff threw out 80 kilos of expired food each week that should have been donated to the poor. 

“Laissez-nous les poubelles!” the complaint concluded, complete with elongated exclamation point: “Leave us your trash!” 

This seemed more than a little unfair to me. The people at Casino are unfailingly polite and helpful, and every day items of food that are about to pass their sell-by date are offered for next to nothing. Could they do more? Probably. But the store, which 20 years ago, having killed off most of the local competition, was number one in the area, is now itself threatened by the rapid expansion of its rival, Intermarché, an all-singing, all-dancing emporium that offers covered car-parking and a drive-in collection service. 

This month, Casino – which closed down two years ago, only to re-open under new management – introduced contact-free payment and a new line of check-outs, including one for the handicapped. At the same time, a chair was jammed against the emergency exit door, previously used by just about everyone, obliging customers to divert to the formal front entrance 20 metres further on. As it happens, there are rarely more than three customers in the store at any one time, so that when you get to the checkout – invariably the one for the handicapped (which is wider) – you have to cough or plunk your basket down heavily on the conveyor belt to attract the caissière’s attention. 

This doesn’t bother me. I like the way the place is run and I don’t want it to go out of business. When we first visited Callac, back in 1999, I noticed a large sign on a gable end giving directions to the Casino. Unfamiliar with the name of the supermarket chain, I was impressed that such an unprepossessing town could offer an alternative to the tables at Monte Carlo. 

Since then, I must have visited the store hundreds of times. It went “bio” for a while after the grand reopening, affecting, rather unconvincingly, to be some kind of new-age health store. But enthusiasm for that that quickly faded. It’s perfect when you need just a carton of milk, a bottle of Côtes du Rhône or a bag of potatoes, though you can, if you wish, do a full shop. The difference is that in Intermarché, you have to line up at the checkouts, behind lines of trolleys, shuffling forward, pretending not to resent the old dears who get out their cheque books, adjust their glasses and root around in their handbags for a biro. In Casino, the line stops with you. So I hope the graffiti isn’t another indication of the beginning of the end. 

But the crazies are everywhere these days. A scrawled message on two sides of the electrical relay station we pass on our way to the pub informs us, in some detail, that vaccines are killing children and that it is all the fault of Bill Gates. The gantries across the N12 dual carriageway leading to Saint Brieuc and Rennes are strewn with reminders that fossil fuels are releasing thousands of tonnes of poison into the atmosphere of rural France. Our friend Paul, who runs the English shop, had to complain when he turned up one morning recently to find that, according to the message freshly inscribed on his shop’s side wall, there was no room in Callac for immigrants.   

But graffiti is not the only talking point hereabouts. My wife and I were awakened in the middle of the night this week by the sound of a powerful engine that seemed to be going nowhere. Our neighbour Jean-françois had also heard it and was shouting out from his bedroom window that he had called the gendarmes. It turned out that thieves were trying to steal a tractor belonging to another of our neighbours, a man in his eighties, who was taken into care after it was deemed that he could no longer cope on his own. 

The robbers were using a tow-truck that, sadly for them, wasn’t up to the job. Realising that the game was up, they promptly fled the scene, leaving the tractor stuck in the middle of a sodden field. The gendarmes didn’t in fact make an appearance until the next morning (there are only six of them and they would have been asleep in their beds) and I have yet to be questioned. No doubt they will get round to me. But it just shows you, crime is everywhere, even in the commune at the end of the universe. 

One other item of news stands out for me this week. Whether or not it reflects a crime depends on your point of view. The local hunting fraternity, known as the Chasse, is boasting that its members succeeded in killing two of the biggest wild boars seen in the area for a number of years. The bigger of the two beasts weighed 150 kilos and had tusks at least six inches long. The other, at 130 kilos, wasn’t far behind. Pictures of their bloodied bodies were sent, with pride, to the local paper, Le Poher, which reported that the 12-strong group of chasseurs believe they had performed a public duty by ridding the countryside of such dangerous animals. 

No one has been killed by a wild boar in Brittany for many years. But as many as 15 people in France are killed each year in hunting accidents. I now await an explanation for why they shoot deer and hares. 

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