Last Thursday I had every intention of going to buy some fresh fruit and veg with friends at a market on the outskirts of Paris. On Sunday, I was going to enjoy a languid sunny Sunday in the gardens of the Château de Versailles.

These plans are as yet unrealised, due to a conspiracy of external forces.

On the up-side, I’ve learnt a new word. The word grève has now entered my basic French vocabulary, as for something like four days (I don’t really know, I lost track), those responsible for Parisian public transport were on strike.

Striking, as Guillaume explained it to me, is as much of a French institution as double-parking. You can grumble about it, but you still admire the audacity.

Apparently there are certain times of the year that are especially strike-prone, for instance, in October (after the budget blow-out from the summer holidays starts to sink in) and after an election (that one will take a lot longer to sink in…). As we are coming to the closing days of a post-election October, I wonder who will go next?

And, ever prone to gossip, has Cécilia Sarkozy chosen this moment to leave Nicolas to silence the cries of the strikers? “Transport strike – what transport strike?” What other headline-grabbing stunts will occur within the Sarkozy entourage next time there is some sort of civil unrest?

On somewhat of a tangent, this reminds me of an account of a Parisian waiters’ strike in Stephen Clarke’s A Year in the Merde:

‘Suddenly the clients were being served by horrendously inefficient but cute students, who traded in their smelly, underpaid jobs at fast-food counters for the joys of earning tips and not having to wear a baseball cap… They didn’t know the ingredients of anything, they dropped plates, the got the bills mixed up. It was just like being in England, where we think that waiting is a temporary job ideally suited to the totally unqualified.’

After some fairly harrowing encounters with some meticulously starched French waiters, the main character, Paul West, thinks that he has died and gone to heaven as the waiters go on strike, and he begins leaving cafes and restaurants with pockets full of phone numbers from waitresses not only willing to date him, but also to speak English. I think somewhere later in the text the pharmacy workers go on strike too.

Had the thought that France might be boring ever crossed my mind? Banish the thought! How could it be with this kind of day-to-day comedy of uncertainty? Who could it be next…?