Italian Wool

I hadn’t owned a suit since the one my parents bought me for my high school farewell dance. It no longer fits me; while I’m still a skinny guy, I’ve gained some ten to fifteen kilos since then, and the pants feel like they’ll split right open at the bum crack at any moment. With an impending trip home to Australia for a friend’s wedding, and a girlfriend who’d been begging me for months to go suit shopping, I relented, and in February i spent a good quarter of my monthly PhD student salary on a new suit, a dark grey Italian wool blend, perfect for the heat of an Australian summer wedding.

The wedding and trip home came and went, the suit coming along with me, hung up in my little brother’s closet, where it remained as I packed my bags to return to France. With another wedding scheduled for this summer (Europe-side, this time), I was faced with a dilemma: to have my lovely new suit shipped from Australia to me in France, risking both the Australian and French postal services (genuinely being unsure which is worse), or buying a cheap new one, prêt-a-porter, to be used and discarded. 

A few weeks after shipping it off, I received an email telling me to make a customs declaration on a package that had been shipped to me from Australia. I declared that it was a personal item, bought in France, and gave it a monetary value (like a complete fool, perhaps). They replied very quickly that my package would be delivered at 8:20am on Monday morning.

The weekend passed uneventfully, and before long it was 8:10am on monday morning, and I was cooking eggs when the doorbell let out its shrill buzz. A young guy was there to greet me, wearing a courier’s uniform, holding a package from Australia post which I recognised very well. “Bonjour, monsieur” he said, “il vous reste 128 euros à payer”.

I had to pay nearly 130 euros of import tax on a suit that I had bought about a kilometre from my house in France. C’est la vie.

No worries, I tell him, I’ll just go and get my card. Only no, he informs me, he doesn’t accept card; he’d only accept cash or cheque. I had forgotten which country I was living in, perhaps.

And so it came about that I found myself sitting in the passenger seat of his white delivery van, flying through our narrow streets on the way to the ATM, stopping to deliver a few packages along the way. “Tu fumes ?” He asks me, offering me a cigarette as he pulls one from the packet with his lips; he’s calling me the familiar tu now, rather than the formal vous. He asks me all sorts of polite questions along the way, in between swearing at drivers he cuts off while making stuntman-level turns up and down the streets and corners of my cramped little city neighbourhood.

The three deliveries we were supposed to make along the way ended up being more like nine or ten, and about 30 minutes later we screech to a stop in front of an ATM. He politely tells me that I could pay him however much I wanted for the drive, as well. When I came back and handed him 130 euros, and he’d been paid a whopping 2 euros for the service of driving me in circles inside a 300 metre perimeter of my apartment for half an hour, our conversation quickly dried up, I went back to being vous, and he dropped me at the end of my street instead of at my doorstep as he’d previously informed me, my package and import tax bill in hand.

Luckily for him, I didn’t take that cigarette, otherwise it would have been basically as though I had robbed him, at least, a robbery equivalent to paying import tax equal to almost a third of the original cost of an item I’d bought in this very country.

Moral Quandaries Over Chequebook Ownership

I distinctly remember seeing my dad’s chequebook when I was very young, and us thinking of it as some kind of ancient artefact, from the times before our civilisation had modernised. I couldn’t have been more than eight years old, and he explained to me that we didn’t really use these things called cheques anymore, that they were from the times before bank cards and the internet. 

This is not the case in France, a country in which I still have my own personal banker, where all the banking infrastructure is bespoke and barely-functioning; a country where I have to mail a letter to the gym through the post office literally on the other side of the road to tell them I’m cancelling my subscription; the country where, when I needed my covid vaccine upon arrival, I discovered after the needle had entered into my arm that I couldn’t pay the 6 euros 50 private vaccination fee by cash or card, but only by cheque. I have refused every step of the way, out of some principle within me that I barely understand, to get a chequebook. And it took them two years and three months to break me, to betray that conversation with my father from nearly 20 years ago, to have me bow my head in shame and request a chequebook from my banker. Lest I be dragged around in another white van for half an hour the next time I want to get a package from my mum, all the while questioning whether or not I’m being robbed. 

What’s the cost of my peace of mind?

Perhaps the most heinous part of this situation is that 130 euros is an incredibly frustrating sum of money; it’s not so little that I don’t care, but it’s not so over-the-top egregious that I can justify spending hours of my time contesting it (if it had been, say, 2000 euros, I wouldn’t rest until I had found a lawyer and squeezed them so hard they eventually gave in). 

To invest the time in research, filing a proper dispute, waiting for a reply, the endless back and forth I’ve come to expect in this country (in fact, double everything for the need to do it all in French), and I feel I’d end up earning a rather measly hourly rate for my work by the time I got my money back - if I were to get it back at all. 

You see, for all I’ve complained about France in this post, the summer seems to have arrived early this year; the skies are blue and the sun sets well after 9pm, the trees and flowers are in bloom, the people are drinking wine along the river, and I could be amongst it all, or pent up in my apartment, fuming over 130 bucks. 

Maybe that’s how the system wins, but perhaps it’s best I let it go for no other reason than I have my nice tailored suit with me, rather than some crappy 200 euro thing I would have bought and cast aside as soon as I could.