As we get more obvious confidence in French, and being in France we seem to attract lost English souls in supermarkets and shops who are completely without any French and have found themselves in a part of rural France where the vast majority of the population are totally without English.
About a week ago when a confused man heard Sile and I talking in English in queue in Intermarche (he was lucky, if we had seen him coming we would have been talking as gaeilge )he asked me was there any chance I could guide him to the salt. An even more pathetic Scotsman approached me at the jam section a few days ago and asked me “Which one was most like Marmelade?”
Yesterday in front of us in a queue were a very young English couple who hadn’t a single word of French. They were hauling up to the check-out from the trolley a huge pack of bottles of water (the lords knows why, we drink happily and healthily from the tap.)
The check-out lady said to them, in French of course, that there was no need to do this as there was a little tab they could pull off to read the bar code without hauling up the whole works.
Total confusion, the English thought they had done something wrong, the French girl was mortified at her helpful attempts seeming to have been taken as a rebuke.
Sile stepped in and told the couple what the girl had said.
The wife thanked us profusely in English, the check out girl thanked us profusely in French and the husband summoned up the full strenghts of the English education system by announcing proudly to Sile “Marcay Bookoo”