A different approach to responsibility

March 7th. Six days before my twin sister will marry. Sunday. Paris. I will, in theory run a half marathon. It should be quite a pleasant trip. I will meet family, we'll enjoy some good food and a little wine, perhaps nip around on a Velib', if the machines will take our non-French cards as deposit.

A place on the race costs 36 €. A reasonable sum, and I think you get a free t-shirt. A medical signature on the 'certificat medical' which all runners are obliged to present when they collect their numbers will cost me 450CHF. The doctor must, according to some seemingly archaic French law, sign a form that states that the running will not fall over and die during the race. I present the form, having fought to get an approved translation of the form in German, to my (very) Swiss doctor (although this is an international event, the organisers did not think so far as to fully translating the website. Mainly leaving the most important pages and necessary documents untranslated), and I attempt to make a joke in my stinted Swiss German about how ridiculous French bureaucracy is.

He instead turns the joke on me. Starts to go through a list of tests I will need in order for him to judge me fit to run a half marathon. I was expecting him to ask me if I smoke, drink and exercise. Instead he ticked, he named tests (which he then translated into English after seeing my puzzled expression, and the translations were not much help), he ticked again, he named more tests. 'Were you expecting it to come to this much?' he asked, with that cocky smile that the Swiss often have when they (often) demand money for something. I said in my best German 'I had no flipping idea!'

My brother's doctor in the UK has refused to sign the form, since he cannot judge, after almost a decade of medical study and perhaps triple that medical experience, whether my brother, who has a job where fitness is a strict requirement, can safely run a half marathon.

We will fake the signature and stick our fingers up in the face of French bureaucracy. I simply do not understand how it is up to a doctor to judge whether you should be running a half marathon. If you collapse in a heap on the second kilometre, then it is almost entirely your fault for stubbonly ignoring your body. If you are knocked over by an arrogant Frenchman in a beret waving a string of garlic in your face on his bone-shaker, then it may well not have been your fault, but there isn't much you can do about it.

Life has to happen without stupid pieces of paper that graduates of the Grandes Ecoles are paid to create and then fossilise so the stupidity can remain for decades and decades without a single bonhomme parisien questioning it.

Vive le non-signing of les formulaires debiles. (Et le franglais, bien sur!)