Shrieks, shots and broken china: a visit to my rural French GP

On a hard chair next to the waiting-room door, I sat for an hour defusing thoughts of my own demise, if all else failed employing conscious untruths. As is the custom here in the hot sweet south, a person entering a room greets it. Being nearest to the door, and the first encountered face, I felt responsible for setting the tone of the waiting room’s responses. Interrupting my morbid sophistries, I returned each new entrant’s greeting in a spirited, democratic, welcoming manner. In this I failed as usual to sound that exact native demotic note and suspect I came across rather as a psychotic waiting for his monthly depot injection.

There were five before me waiting to see the doctor. A young mother, frantic with exhaustion, entertained her baby by dangling it in front of the aquarium. Another mum was passing tissues to a small boy who sneezed explosively at unpredictable intervals. A biggish woman sat bolt-upright on the waiting room’s other dining chair looking neither left nor right as though eye contact alone might have adverse consequences for her health.

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The surgery door opened and Mme Benoit, the doctor, jogged into the waiting room like the fancied welterweight challenger. Celebrated locally for receiving her patients in outfits more readily associated with the trapeze than with the Hippocratic oath, today she was relatively constrained within a sober grey wool dress and knee-length leather boots. No longer young but still quite some piece, Mme Benoit has complete disregard for what other people might think of her, which in my book doubles her sexual attractiveness. She stood radiating command and presence and every eye was turned expectantly on her — even the fearful woman with the tunnel vision’s — as we wondered what social enormity Mme Benoit might commit next.