Alba
I don’t believe in wasted days but there was little gained by driving up to Alba yesterday evening, realising that there was no way I could do any useful work and then driving back to Nice today. I am now the proud owner of a set of snow chains for a Ford Fiesta. I have eaten fresh fungi porcini from the forests of the Roero. But apart from those two facts there is little to show for my time and certainly little that will advance the cause of the Piemonte part of this walk. And despite my refusal to believe that time is ever wasted, there are days which, if they happened to fall on Friday the thirteenth, would make for positive proof of an old superstition. Having wasted time in the car I wasted money on snow chains, chose a bad restaurant for dinner and a worse waiter.
Cars are a device which should be spread a lot less liberally across the planet and particularly among certain nationalities. French drivers are aggressive and have little time for people who don’t know where they are going and less for those who do not know what they are doing but they do know how to handle a car. They have accidents but not through inattention or bad technical ability. They have accidents because they leave so little room for error. The Italians, so close and in many ways so similar to the southern French, have a completely different problem. They honestly believe that they can drive a vehicle through a solid object. This is usually another car but it can be a barrier or even a building. They will drive into a position where there is NO POSSIBILITY of avoiding having to stop yet only touch the brakes at the very last moment in utter disbelief that the queue of 30 cars waiting at a toll booth hasn’t magically evaporated before they arrive. One nice trait of Italian drivers is that most of the time they don’t get angry, they are too busy getting past the next car in front of them that they have no interest in the one they have just passed. Only rich Italians get angry behind the wheel. The BMW 6 series seems to attract the same personality all over the globe (and the X6 interestingly). In fact rich Italians seem to be the angrier in all sorts of circumstances.
My waiter was French and was not unpleasant. He brought me the things that I ordered so if it had not been such a pointless day all around I probably would never have focussed on him at all. But he had that annoying mannerism, which I had thought nearly extinct, that you find among a few people who work with tourists which is the inability to understand a word you say. It doesn’t matter that you speak better French than he does, he knows you are foreign and knows also that he will not be able to make out a word of any language that passes your lips. Without being immodest I am a reasonable linguist and the French word for bread is not beyond me. But as it reached his ears I could have been asking for a seared unicorn liver. “Comment? Du vin?” I spat p at the start of the word at him several times with no effect. I pointed at the next table. “Du sel?” Eventually the centime dropped.
It is all of course a sign of a deep lack of imagination and engagement. If he was interested in his job or his customers this would not happen. So I will not be returning to tonight’s restaurant. Stupid of me to think I could find something worth eating in the cours Saleya.
It always feels good to put all the grumbles into one edit. A more positive day tomorrow I am sure.
