You order your fridge online and a couple of hefty Poles install it in your kitchen. You open it in order to stock it with goodies and Jamal from the Sudan falls out. One thing you don’t expect when ordering your white goods is an African immigrant to come with it, but given the swarm (David Cameron’s description – not mine) of immigrants from all parts of the third world trying to get into Britain – by hook-or-by-crook – or in their case “by-truck-or-by-train”, it might happen sooner than you imagine.
The thing is that no one has a clue what to do about these people from distant shores. They get to Calais – some have paid people traffickers thousands to get there – and there they sit in a makeshift shantytown waiting for an opportunity to “board” a mode of transport and hightail it across the Channel to the Promised Land.
The French police seem to have zero interest in preventing Said from Syria in performing the sort of stunts that would get him an “extras” part on a Mission Impossible flick. It’s almost as if they think these people are suddenly going to decide to return to home because taking one’s chances jumping onto a slow moving pantechnicon is somehow less risky than enduring one day in some of the terror-infested and poverty-stricken hellholes that they have escaped from.
Uh Florien have another bite of Camembert and swig some wine – it’s never going to happen.
It’s a bit of a perfect storm in that the ferry workers based in Calais are also on strike. Francois is pissed because he is actually being asked to do some work between endless coffee and cigarette breaks – and of course an hour for lunch – and has vented his frustration by burning tyres and causing mayhem for tourists travelling to France on holiday.
Jamal probably looks at Francois’s behaviour with a degree of envy. Try that sort of thing in Sudan and you’ll be lucky to get away with a bloodied back from the whipping that accompanies the sentence handed down for disturbing the peace.
I’m heading across the Channel in a few months time to celebrate Christmas with the family. My hope is that the French port authorities have granted Francois an extra week’s leave a year – to add to the ten he already has – and sent him home, but what of Jamal, Said and thousands like them? Will he be sent home with fresh hope and a spring-in-his-step?
No. For Jamal “hope” is a commodity in very short supply, but as long as an inkling of an opportunity exists to hitch a ride to the UK, he will continue to play cat-and-mouse with the trucks as they lumber towards the Crossing.
Out.