Slower still
Sir: Michael Frayn missed out on two optional extras during his enjoyable session changing money at the Banque de France at Laon (`The root of all delay', 1 Febru- ary).
1) Having negotiated the red and green lights through the first door, the security system did not decide that the heavy old French hotel bedroom key in his trouser pocket was a revolver (though of much the same shape and weight) and did not imprison him in the phone-box space before the second door. Queues of increas- ingly infuriated, gesticulating but inaudible customers did not build up outside, while he waited for human assistance from with- in, long in arriving and also inaudible.
2) Once inside and having presented his traveller's cheque, the clerk did not heave out an enormous tome containing the sig- natures of the directors of what must have been every bank in the world, searching long and in vain for that of the director of the National Westminster (could it be that he and the bank were a fabrication?) before at last giving up and beginning his inevitably endless computations.
These two entertaining encounters hap-
`It's the Laddie of the Loch.'
pened to me (admittedly not on the same day) at branches of the Credit Agricole in Provence. Perhaps there's a lesson there from the south for the Banque de France at Laon?
But it's too late. As Michael Frayn laments, there will be no more such inno- cent though time-wasting fun, come the Single European Currency. Too bad for him, and me too.
Eleanor Boyle
39 Lansdowne Road, London W11
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