Paris La Nuit

  Last Friday night, friends of mine invited me to a typical French auberge-like restaurant in Le Marais as a belated birthday treat. I sneaked outside for a cigarette as the dessert was not to my liking (a mille-feuilles, my friends, MUST be made with crème pâtissière; crème Chantilly or vanilla-flavoured crème fouettée as my kind waiter later corrected me is just not on). So there I was, sucking on my fag in the not so cold night, looking at the narrow streets and their blue signs, watching dressed-up women light up before elegantly climbing into taxis when it suddenly dawned on me that I hadn't spent an evening like this in Paris for over thirteen years. It should have felt weird, yet it didn't. Yet it did.

It didn't in the sense that it felt like those thirteen years only lasted a couple of days and it did because obviously they did not. It felt like the place had not changed, the Parisians had not changed, but I had. It felt like I was travelling back in time, like I was visiting the ghosts of my past, yet another reminder that however restless I can get, however uncertain I sometimes am, the way is forward and going back is not an option.

When I go to France I say I am going home.

When I leave France I say I am going back home.

One of the friends I saw that night, Jo, is Swedish. She moved to London aged 19, then to Paris five years ago. She doesn't miss Sweden, she misses London.

The weird life of expats.

Something I'll never know: what it feels like to be born, raised, live forever in the same place. To have childhood friends.

Next step is to find that special place that really will be my home.  

But really the next immediate step is to do some bloody writing, thing I've been avoiding all day, setting up a new blog instead. tssk tssk! ;)