Social Security

The French have many, many strengths. They make the best bread and the prettiest cakes; have perfected insouciance; and ostensibly have even made infidelity acceptable - with Monsieur le Président leading by example. France is the land of the paradox: meals are rich and abundant whilst waistlines are anything but; there are rules and laws for everything but most are fervently ignored; and although the French love paperwork like nothing else, they don't seem to know quite what to do with it.

Don't expect to get anything official done quickly here. The Holy Grail is the dossier, a weighty portfolio of personal information, and a requirement for most daily tasks. Equipped with this, indefatigable persistence and skin as thick as a rhinoceros, you are ready to take on French administration.

Nowhere is a steely resolve more vital than at Sécurité Sociale, the organisation responsible for health insurance. The system here is incomparable to the NHS, being more similar to the American arrangement whereby people have to pay up-front for any medical care, before being reimbursed by the 'sécu'. This providing that you have survived the process of joing this organisation (a term I use loosely) without a succesful suicide attempt; you see, it can be rather soul-destroying.

First, you have to skip along with your dossier, sit in line for a few hours, and explain your intentions to a disinterested receptionist. No matter how fluent your French, you will undoubtedly be asked to repeat yourself several times. Then, perhaps, you will be transferred into the hands of a dedicated officer, for whom you will need to wait a good hour at least. Staring vacantly at the neon number - the like one finds at a supermarket deli counter - it is amazing how your resolve can slip away.

Assuming you make it into the office, have the patience to repeat yourself another few times, and have a steady enough hand to fill in the relevant forms, your dossier will be checked. And provided you've paid your 50 euros to have your birth certificate translated, have photocopied everything you own, and have included the name of your mother's first pet in this personal directory, they might just shake your hand and begin the process of immatriculation.

Trudging home, any sense of triumphance is hard to muster, the fact of the matter being that none of your tenacity, charm and graciousness will pay off for at least six weeks: if you get ill before that, consider homeopathy.