Also available en blanc

It’s Monday rush hour, and despite the fact that you left home at some ungodly pre dawn hour, you’re still stuck in the slow lane of the motorway watching both your fellow work bound lemmings and a stream of enormous artics creeping past. Comme d’hab. To pass the time, you call the ‘how am I driving’ freephone number on the back of the nearest lorry and report that, as of 6.30am, the answer is surprisingly well. Head south over the channel though, and it’s a different story.

First, other than the occasional péage bottleneck, you’ll find queues as rare as a smiley gendarme. Second, despite the supposedly regulated vitesse of big commercial vehicles, you’ll find most can waft along at warp speed all day long. And do. Finally, even when they do go slow enough for you to read what’s written on the tailgate, you’ll find a remarkable lack of quasi rhetorical questions relating to the driver’s prowess at the wheel – probably because he’s a French male, and therefore equally gifted at driving and in the sack. But thanks for asking anyway.

And when he’s finished chomping his way through a yorkie or two (the chocolate bar, not the dog), he’ll park up for the obligatory weekend off (civilised, but a logistics nightmare for businesses reliant on road transport) and spend the next couple of days ferrying his four kids about in a people carrier. Having been instrumental in producing said brood (and further advertised his virility with the multiple ‘bébé en bord’ stickers on the tailgate), he’s able to take advantage of the state provided free house cleaning service, school meals, child benefit payments, tax relief and chauffeur driven stretch limo to the shops each week. Ok – I lied about the limo, but in Hollande’s brave new world, better a knight of the road rather than of the realm.  Eat your heart out, Monsieur Stobart.