I am prepared to learn to be patient, but it’s the ‘jostling and pushing’ you describe that bothers me. I have identified two types: the middle aged man who thinks that by standing as close behind you as possible, even making squeamishly uncomfortable body contact and breathing down your neck, will make the queue move faster.

Type B are the older ladies (normally not men I might add) who, in a fruit and vegetable shop for instance, park their baskets in a queue while they browse the aisles, thus securing their places ahead of the shoppers foolish enough to select their items before queuing to pay. I’ve been close to explaining that this is not how queuing works, but have resisted until now.

Younger French, I might add, don’t seem to display the same characteristics. Does one get more impatient in France with age?

However, step out anywhere further afield than the local village and a different kind of customer cruelty is unleashed – the queue. One of the things I am more often teased about for being British (besides my habitude to bad weather) is an apparent ability to stand patiently and queue for hours without the very-French jostling and pushing that queuing here entails. However, after wasting what seemed like my very life one afternoon in a Monoprix queue, I want to put that theory up for debate.

If, in Britain, we queue quietly and politely, it’s because we expect to be served at least within the next ten minutes. If there aren’t enough people on the tills, we politely tell a passing teenage shop assistant that more people are needed and lo, a bellow for “all staff to tills” rings from on high. Sorted. Here (in Carrefour and Casino too, I’m not singling one store out!), you can expect to wait twenty minutes easily while two grumpy middle-aged ladies scanning at the speed of evolution yell back and forth to each other, “Alors, tu finis quand, toi?” The other five tills will remain resolutely empty while shop assistants wander around ‘tidying’ or chatting, but at least trying to look too busy to attack the queue, which, by now, is ten people deep and snaking around the aisles so you can’t reach the teabags.

Asking to put more people on the tills is likely to result in a death-stare of Darth Vader proportions. No, you must wait. And wait. And wait. It simply would not happen in the UK – we would dump our full trolleys, storm out and write a nasty letter to Head Office, furious that we, the customer, could be treated in such a way. Not so, here. I have another theory. The French are known for being a nation of philosophers. Forget all you have learned of late-night, revolutionary cafe culture, I reckon all the best thinking was done while standing in those queues, waiting…