Remembering

Every Thursday morning, Dad would get up early to make a pot of tea. He’d put a banana on a plate, with a knife, because he always used one to make a cut at the base of the stalk to make it easier to peel. Or neater maybe. He was fastidious like that, in strange little ways. So I’d come out to find everything ready for my usual rushed breakfast, the morning after my weekly dinner and sleepover at Mum and Dad’s place, before making the trek back into the city. And because he knew I had to throw things down so quickly before running for the bus, he’d pour me a mug of hot tea, then add a dash of cold water to bring it to gulping temperature. He’d always remember.
Every morning I remember too. I make my mug of tea, then take it to the sink for a quick twist of the cold tap. It’s just one small ritual which hurts sometimes, and helps. It reminds me of the care I took for granted, and which I go on missing. Two years on, I’m learning to cherish these daily moments of memory.

The Devil Wears Lipstick

Went to see a jewel of a show last night: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea by theatre company 1927. A devious blend of sinister fairy tales, peep-hole naughtiness and nonsense verse, all delivered with gallows deadpan and cut glass accents, it left me feeling utterly elated.
After a mood-setting music hall Charleston, a series of darkly comic vignettes unfolded, blending white-faced actors with scratchy film and animation in a virtuosic display of precisely-timed anarchy. Edwardian nursery stories were deliciously subverted, so that children dress up as crack whores, twin sisters torment grandmamma with sticks, and the Devil does drag. Combined with 1920s touches of silent-film piano, cabaret and black bobbed hair, it was a bit like Louise Brooks reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales on acid. A perfect nightmare before Christmas.

Noooooo!

Leaving France, I thought I'd escaped the sickening sight of finger heart. I almost spat coffee when I saw the below image in the Guardian jobs pages, at the bottom of a recruitment advert for an Associate Director, PR & Communications. I wonder if you can guess which organisation thought it appropriate and desirable to represent themselves with such a nauseating abomination...

Snugg as a bugg

The first real frost overnight! Icing sugared backyard. Wandsworth Common looks anything but as I jog around it, in full winter regalia (running gloves and triple-layered top). I zigzag delightedly from puddle to puddle, cracking the ice as I steam around the great milky field. Disgruntled ducks tread gingerly on the pond, walking winter miracles on the solid surface. It’s been months since I’ve been able to go jogging, thanks to a dicky ankle, and to ease back into it on such a morning makes me hum with pleasure.
Less humming at home, where the cold really seeps and bites. No double glazing here, just thin chilly panes sapping the central heating. I find myself doing housework just to warm up. Yesterday, finally fed up with frozen toes, I stormed into M&S and bought myself the daggiest pair of slippers I could find. Tan moccasins. Dreadfully, wonderfully lined with thick faux fur. To deal with the cold, I’ve decided, you just have to embrace your inner bogan. Manky trackie daks, ratty cardigans and layer upon layer of fashion-backward poly-fleece.
In fact it seems that bogan is the new black here in London. There is one store in the glittering new Westfield London (infinitely flashier than Fountain Lakes, it seems, and blingier even than Bondi Junction) which has had to employ door bitches (seriously) to control the velvet-roped crowds clamouring to get inside. It’s the Ugg boot shop.
So there you have it. The London look for Winter 08/09: BoBogan (Bourgeois Bogan. Or should that be Fauxgan?). Top Shop shelves are already groaning with skinny jeans and check flannel shirts. Time to complete the trend with my fake fluffy footwear, which shall now be known as the mockasin.
As showcased in the timeless stylings of Michelle and Ferret.

Le retour

It was our first trip to Paris as visitors last weekend. Since giving up our resident status and moving to London back in July, I have often wondered how this first visit would feel. Would we be mauled by melancholy and remembrance of things past? Or would it be too soon for that; would we simply fall back into a humdrum residential experience? Both possibilities made me apprehensive.
As it happens, our time was too rushed to take real stock of any reaction. From the moment we picked up the family wagon hire car, the weekend was a tense blur of motorways, ferry crossings, traffic and packing. Saturday, our only full day in Paris, slid by in unsatisfactory fits, shopping aimlessly while I tried desperately to think what I’d rather be doing. It was of course wonderful to see friends – generously warm and welcoming as ever. That was one of the very best things about our brief return: discovering that, for us, the beauty of Paris will no longer just be in the buildings or the river or the light.
Having said that, I did experience one thrilling, “pinch me I’m in Paris” moment. After battling the grey waves of shoppers on the rue de Rivoli, we turned a corner and there, backlit by sudden sun, were the towers of Notre Dame, capped by the distant dome of the Panthéon. Moved almost to tears by this familiarly ravishing sight, I was then delighted by a new marvel: the delicate white Tour Saint-Jacques, finally unwrapped after years of restoration. We sat at its foot sipping cafés express, gazing on the bleached stone tracery, and I realised with relief that I need not fear this Paris ambivalence. We will take the best of both worlds, sashaying like locals along the boulevards, while gasping like tourists at treats (re)discovered.
Let them have cake, and eat it, too.

Holiday highlights 2

Dinner in Ajaccio, our cheerfully shambling waiter serving wild boar and bitter dark myrtle liqueur

The harrowing hairpinned Gorges de Spelunca, and the relieved rush getting out of the car unscathed

Square towers squatting on warm rocks reflected in bright gentle blue

Close encounters of the cloven-hoofed kind driving through unhurried trips of mountain goats

High granite picnics and crushed wild mint

Following a liquid jade tumble up and up to its round mountain source

Strong local beer tasting of chestnuts and malt

St. Florent sunsets over Cap Corse, shushed by waves on the pebble beach below

Holiday highlights 1

Impressions from Bordeaux and the Périgord:

Chatty apéritifs with Mum on the thin hotel terrace, hung over the darkening spires of Bordeaux
The shock of grey gothic stone and hot terracotta looking down over Cathédrale St. André
Witnessing opulence restored leaf by gilt leaf in the jewel-like Grand Théâtre
The overblown tumult and exuberance of the Fontaine des Girondins

Picnics watching fish swim lazily in the Dordogne, fixed in the limpid current
Skirting the twilight vineyards, hands sticky with blackberries and figs
Staying with the sun from first to last through the full high arc of blue, day after day
Feeling slightly voyeuristic at vendange watching the harvester tickling the grapes beneath vineleafy skirts
Distant pops of hunters’ shot and treehouse ladders to canopy lookouts
Dining and laughing amongst the vines, evenings dissolving into parlour game idiocy
The postcard perfection of the Château de Montbazillac

Sunk

I fear I’m becoming a naturalised Pom because of my kitchen sink. I have always sniggered at the curious English practice of washing up in a plastic bucket placed in the sink. I always thought this a pointless and parsimonious little habit – a bizarre hangover from post-war bleakness perhaps. (Was Fairy Liquid rationed?)
You’d thank that it would be drought-dry Australia with this thrifty tradition of sparse water washing. It’s only recently however that grey water collecting and whiplash showers have become so widespread there. Surely if there’s one country that should be up to its elbows in luxurious suds, it’s England. With so much water falling down everywhere outside, showers should be lavish monsoon-like affairs, rather than these anaemic dribbles which are so useless at removing shampoo.
So when quizzed about the bucket-in-sink phenomenon, most English people murmur something about being able to empty leftover wine into the sink without tainting the washing-up water. Now it won’t surprise you to learn that I’ve never had a problem with leftover wine, but I have succumbed to the English method simply because my sink has a leak. So until it’s fixed, I’ll have to go native as I snap on my Marigolds and bend over my frugal bowl of bubbles.
Fortunately, before I become irreversibly anglicised (dare I say minogued?) I’m off to France and Italy for a few weeks of continental therapy. I’ll blog more on my return, I promise.

Changing Rooms, Soane-style

This bland façade at 13, Lincoln’s Inn Fields hides an Aladdin’s cave of artistic quirk. It is the Sir John Soane’s Museum – a bewitching magpie’s nest cluttered with curiosities in stone, plaster and paint.
Soane, an architect best known for designing the Bank of England building, seems to have been an early DIY renovation fanatic. He began in 1792 with a single house containing living areas, a library and drawing room where he schmoozed his clients. Over the following 30 years, however, he undertook an extreme home makeover, demolishing and remodelling, gradually spreading into the two neighboring properties. His aim was to create the ideal space to display his extraordinary collection so that “amateurs and students” of architecture could appreciate and learn from the classics.
Apart from an abundance of antiquities (including a cross-eyed Hercules looking for all the world like a dim-witted quarterback), there are countless fragments of architecture: plaster casts and marble cast-offs perching and crowding every inch of space. It must be hell to dust. There is even the enormous alabaster sarcophagus of the pharaoh Seti I, which the British Museum couldn’t afford, and had to be installed though a demolished wall. Soane threw a three-day party to celebrate its arrival.
My favourites however were the paintings: three Canalettos, glorious expanses of Venetian detail and light, and an embarrassment of Hogarths. An entire room in fact full of two Hogarth series: A Rake’s Progress and An Election. I could have stood for hours, gasping with recognition of the funny, brutal and poignant characters in these canvasses.
The star of the museum, though, is the building itself. Soane’s wonderfully modern eccentricity shines through in the way light is coaxed into every corner of the house, through glass domes and metal grilles, so that unexpected shafts illuminate even the depths of the sepulchral chamber. Here, you really do feel like you are exploring a crumbling crypt or the half-excavated streets of an ancient city.
Just as Soane, in his home-reno makeover madness, intended.

AUSSIE IN CHIPPY FROGGY TITTY SHOCK

We arrived in London last Thursday. The first thing I noticed was the sickly-savoury smell of hot chips, wafting and soaking entire stretches of street. Chip shops here as common as boulangeries in Paris, and while the warm greasy pall is perhaps not as exquisite as butter-pastry bouquet de baguette, it must have spoken to some deep need within, for my first meal here was fish and chips with a pint of Guinness.
“Oh la la, mais quel cliché, le fish and chips, c’est so British!” This was the next surprise: almost every second person you overhear seems to be speaking French. I had heard that there has been a massive influx of young frenchies to London, keen to gain experience in the anglo-saxon corporate world, but I was not prepared for the sheer number. Someone told me before leaving Paris that London was now the second French city in the world by population, and I find that utterly believable. It’s quite comforting to hear the familiarity of French all around, making the cross-channel transition softer somehow. But I’m ashamed to admit how often I feel a mean surge of schadenfreude when I see a poor frog-out-of-water grappling with English. See what it’s like? See?
Language is just one reason why I am feeling instantly comfortable here. So many unexpected idiosyncrasies seem to remind me of Sydney, from red-tiled terraces to the way shops are strung out along the high street. Sunday trading! Customer service! And – bright zenith of pleasure - fat weekend newspapers!
There are of course other aspects of life here which strike me as particularly British. Bosoms, for example. Our first night in London was a marvellous introduction to that unique “oo-er” naughtiness which is so very English. We went to a taping of The Sunday Night Project hosted by Alan Carr, the current Queen of TV innuendo, and his guest Barbara Windsor, of “Carry On” fame. We enjoyed classic clips of Barbara’s bra pinging off and giggled at character names such as “Doctor Nookey”. It may be a French(ish) term, but the double entendre is, to me, quintessentially English. Take this smutty gem from “Carry on Columbus":

Marco: I wouldn’t if I were you, miss. I’ve heard these waters are full of man-eating sharks.
Chiquita: Oh no! So if I fell in, do you think they’d swallow me whole?
Marco: No, I’m told they spit that bit out.

Ah, England. The land of Charles Dickens, tabloid headlines and Mrs. Malaprop. I feel at home already. Yes, we’ll miss Paris. Painfully. But so far it’s been an encouraging opening (fnar!) to our cross-channel odyssey.
Or, as the Rev. Spooner might have called it: “A Sail of Two Titties”.*

* With apologies to Monty Python.

Steamy

Just try to resist those krazy prices!

P.S. Happy Blogiversary to me. Thanks to you.

Cat Lady

I see her every so often on my morning run, this woman walking her fat tortoiseshell in the park. On a leash. The cat seems so utterly mortified to be seen in public in such a demeaning situation, and punishes its misguided owner by refusing to walk very much at all. It just stands there, facing away from pointing passers by, tail twitching indignantly. Simmering and waiting for the shame to end.

Cat Lady coos and coaxes, but Minou won’t be having it. Usually, having passed them in the same place a few times, I see her walking sadly up the hill, the cat grimly triumphant in her arms.

I’ll miss them.

Chunnel vision

It’s time to face it. Time to admit that our days in Paris are numbered. In a little over three weeks, the lease ends on our apartment and we have to move on.

We’ve set our sights on London.

Like so many Frenchies, we’ve decided to give our careers a shot in the arm by going where the work is. LSP has suffered for so long, swimming against the tide in the French job market, where experience, it seems, counts for nothing unless you’ve been to the right school, and handwriting analysis is seen as a legitimate recruitment tool. I, too, will have more options to broaden my field of work, being able to work in the UK thanks to a British-born grandmother.

So we’re shaking ourselves out of what has become, if we’re honest, semi-retirement and plunging back into the fast lane. The main thing, we tell ourselves, is that we’re staying in Europe, close to our ever-expanding clan of friends and family here, and still providing an attractive option for our Australian circle to visit!

The master plan is still Paris; but Paris on our terms, in security and certainty. One day, with replenished resources and renewed desire, we will return to carve our slice of this wonderful place.

In the meantime, we are keeping the farewell melancholy at bay by packing and looking for somewhere to live. Nothing like a rising wave of panic to stem the tide of sentiment.

Lord. Even my metaphors are muddled.

Shhh!

The most annoying man in the world was at my gym this morning.

I was in the middle of my wake-up workout, whittling away the grogginess, when my slowly sharpening focus was shattered. The swing doors smacked open and in he strutted: Mr. Cocky McTosspot. You know the type. His invasive swagger advertised his inadequacies so loudly that he might as well have been holding a sign saying “I DRIVE A RED SPORTS CAR.” He was one of those sad little men who compensate by making as much unnecessary noise as possible.

Ratcheting up the seat on the machines with an arrogant flick. Adjusting the weights with showy clanks. Huffing and straining, veins popping ostentatiously. Dramatic grunts and hiss-counting reps: “Dix-huitttttttt, dix-neufffffff, VINGT!” and then dropping the weight with an echoing crash as if to crow “Hear that? Hear how much iron I can lift?”

Mister, if eye-rolling made a noise, I’d be DEAFENING you right now.

Then, appalling cherry on the cake of his awfulness, he answers his mobile and shouts belligerently at some poor assistant. Repeatedly.

My mind seethes with revenge-thoughts of frightening violence. I stand up and tap him on the shoulder as he admires himself sickeningly in the mirror. I reach down, take his phone, place it on the floor, and smash it to pieces with a 25 kilo dumbbell.

OK, that last bit didn’t actually happen. But I did give him a really withering look on my way out. Take THAT, McTosspot!

Lemon Drops

Back in Paris after a glorious time on and around the Amalfi coast. Impressions and highlights:

The transformation of Capri in the evening, when the daytripping hordes have emptied onto the ferries, and the island exhales into dusk.

Sunset Bellinis made from fresh white peaches on an impossible terrace hanging – so high! -above the soft darkening sea, pink cliffs fading in the twilight chill.

Trying not to hum "Funiculì, Funiculà" on the ride down to the Marina Grande.

Arriving at our villa in Amalfi, running from room to room trying to work out which one Ingrid Bergman used to sleep in.

Breakfasts on the blue-tiled terrace, squinting into the diamond-dazzled sea.

Exploring the terraced gardens dropping down to the water, picking armfuls of fruit and flowers.

Days spent at the tiny beach club, lizard-like on the rocks, and long shady lunches of seafood and wine.

The crystalline sea, so cold it made you laugh, enticing with mysterious grottos and white pebble coves.

The colourful chaos of a religious festival greeting St. Andrew’s relics, arriving by boat from a two-day visit Rome, to be re-interred in the Duomo, 800 years to the day since they first arrived from Constantinople. Priests and policemen, sailors and schoolchildren, everyone bedecked in robes, band-striped uniforms (swoon!) and medieval finery, church bells topping the joyful din.

Fireworks after dinner, deafeningly close, lighting up the buildings clinging to the hillsides like a Neapolitan nativity scene.

Afternoon gelato and after-dinner digestifs.

White-knuckled bus trips along clinging cliff-top roads, winding and lurching from near-miss to near-death, trying still to take in the beauty flashing by.

The first thrilling moment in the streets of Pompeii when you share the sensations of its original inhabitants, shockingly immediate.

The smell of wood smoke and wisteria in the gardens of Ravello, perched prow-like over the coast.

Being told I spoke Italian with a Portuguese accent.

Above all, and everywhere, the scent of citrus blossom; the lush yellow and sharp syrup of lemon.

Alien

I should have been prepared for the sweet-sad hit of homesickness when I crushed the eucalyptus leaf and breathed in the dry, blue sky scent. It had been a reflex action on seeing the gum tree so unexpectedly in the middle of the Parc André Citroën, a modern and rather strict stretch of green between the Seine and the 15^th arrondissement. In seeking shelter from another bustling spring shower, I’d found myself in a towering glasshouse featuring the flora of Australia and New Zealand. I wandered around the unlikely patch of sandy scrub, revelling in the familiarity of the plants and quietly amused at how incongruous they looked, these straggly spiky things, encased in their glittering palace and categorised with bombastic botanical signage. I walked and greeted them one by one, pricking my skin on their sharp little leaves and smelling their small honeyed flowers. I ran my finger between the red fibre ridges of the bottlebrush, licking the nectar drips and tasting my childhood.

Sweet, yes, but sad too, to see these friends transplanted so far from home. The anaemic silky oak stretching towards the glass roof made me think of the shivering clumps of wallabies I’d seen in the dismal menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes. Or the poor mute kookaburra pining in the Hong Kong zoo. At least I’d chosen to uproot myself and come to the other side of the world, unlike these dejected specimens, enforced foreigners, bravely drawing my pity away from myself.

The rain passed and I held the gum leaf to my nose, inhaled home deeply, and stepped out blinking into the gorgeous, garish green.

Buds

We had a little taste of Spring on Saturday, with late-teen temperatures giving everything a sheen of burgeoning brightness. I love seeing the tips of the chestnut branches swell and shine, so ready to burst overnight in a fresh riot of feathery green.

This was my view as I sat out on our balcony for the first time this year, luxuriating in the anticipation of leafy peacefulness.

There is something so quintessentially French about the way they prune their trees. It makes the springtime transformation even more miraculous: black brutal stumps throwing out such verdant, misty filigree.

Only a few weeks to go until they remove the signs in the parks telling you that the lawns are having their Winter rest, and picnic season will finally be able to spread out its gingham blanket invitingly.

Not quite yet, though. La Chaîne Météo has just told me to expect storms with the possibility of light snow next week. Rough winds indeed.

Liberté, Egalité, Fidélité

At what point can you say – with the conviction of a local – that you truly live in Paris?

We have been here for two years now (can you believe it?) and there have been many important Parisification progress-markers: renting an apartment, opening a bank account, making friends, obtaining a Carte de Séjour, finding a job, falling off a Vélib and attending the Bastille Day fireman’s ball.

While these are all impressive and hard-won achievements, I’ve found it is the everyday accomplishments which really count when it comes to feeling like you belong; the exhilarating mini-milestones which mark your integration. We were walking in the Parc Montsouris on Sunday (it’s our local, don’t you know) when we happened to bump into a French friend. Well, friend-of-a-friend is probably more accurate, but the point is he was French, and we knew him. We had a chat, promised to catch up for a drink and moved on, secretly thrilled by our first Totally Random Acquaintance Encounter. Absurd how much it made us feel like we’d arrived, this knowledge that, just like any other Parisian, we could run into people we knew at any time.

You come to cherish and celebrate these little landmark moments: the first time you stare haughtily back at a passer-by, until they look away. The day when the boulanger selects the choicest, softest baguette and hands it to you with a smile. That occasion when someone asks you for directions, and you can confidently give them. Or that sweet golden instant when the supermarket cashier asks if you have a carte de fidélité and you proclaim “Oui!”, producing it with a nonchalant flourish.

It’s taken me two years but I finally have “frequent shopper” loyalty cards for my two local supermarkets. They’re completely useless, of course, in terms of earning discounts or extra value. I couldn’t even tell you what the complicated accruals mean at the bottom of my docket. Their worth lies entirely in the “resi-dentity” they bestow; they make me feel like a true riverain, a card-carrying member of the neighbourhood. I finally belong in the local shop. For local people. And perhaps in another two years I’ll learn how to redeem my millions of points and exchange them for a novelty key-ring.

Now all I need is a plaid nylon shopping cart and I’ll fit right in.

Frightfully

I finally watched Atonement last night. As far as I can make out, it’s a film about people talking veh veh fast, whilst walking tehly tehly quickly. I found it all quite exhausting. (I can’t imagine how the actors felt.)

What is it about Keira Knightley: the jaw? The mouth? Dreadful.

Excess

I was delighted to note, on one of my neighbourhood wanderings (incurable flâneur that I am) that a local street is named after M. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin.

It tickled me that he is described as “magistrat et gastronome”: only in France, I suspect, would the two be considered of equal importance.

“Oh yes, he was a brilliant lawyer and politician. But his real claim to fame, bien entendu, is that he really loved his food.”

I first came across the name of this renowned epicure in the beautiful burgundian village of Époisses. We were tasting the local cheese, a rich-runny marvel of pungent creaminess, its dusk orange rind washed lovingly with marc de Bourgogne. Our host proudly told us that Brillat-Savarin himself had proclaimed Époisses the King of cheeses. (Not the Baby Cheeses, then?)

Having done some research, I now realise what a high honour it was to have been thus described by such a fromagophilic giant of gastronomy. This is the man who wrote: "Dinner without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye." He obviously took food very seriously indeed; another famous quote of his asserts that "The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity, than the discovery of a new star."

Riiight.

Perhaps the street sign should read: “magistrat, gastronome et hyperboliste”.

Renovating?

I must give you the name of our local painting & decorating supplies shop.

X-rated

It’s not every literary exhibition that comes with a parental warning. It’s a bit of a shock, then, to see that under-16s are forbidden from entering the French National Library’s latest: L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque Nationale. And at the risk of sounding prude, it’s a good thing, too!

The exhibition displays some of the racier contents of the library’s “sealed section”: the hell-vault used to protect the reading public from sexually explicit and morally corrupting writing, images and photography. It showcases everything from manuscripts of the Marquis de Sade to Japanese erotic woodblock prints via naughty postcards and early porno films.

Now I’m not suggesting that under-16s should be necessarily excluded because of the saucy nature of the exhibits (and, let’s be clear, some are very saucy indeed). The unfortunate fact is they’ll probably have seen worse on the web, Net Nanny notwithstanding. It’s more because of the sheer blushing, squirming embarrassment of looking at anything of a sexual nature with one’s elders that I think youngsters should stay away.

Even I, at more than double the minimum age, felt exquisitely uncomfortable as I sidled around the display cases, trying not to spend too long in front of any one image, lest the old lady on my left thought I was some drooling deviant. I made such a show of reading the captions and accompanying explanatory notes that I barely even registered the rude pictures themselves, so swift was my nonchalant, “I’m an intellectual not a pervert” scan. Funnily enough, the old lady had no such compunction in inspecting the exhibits in great and appreciative detail. In fact it was quite difficult to get close enough for even a cursory glance at some displays, so thick was the cluster of forthright grey-haired admirers.

It doesn’t matter which side of sixteen you fall on, there is just something deeply disturbing about looking at explicit images of fornication next to someone who could be your grandmother.

Apart from that, the exhibition is most enjoyable. Oh, but not in a dirty, hands-in-pockets sort of way, you understand. Gosh. I mean it’s very instructive and historically edifying. Yes. Edifying.

Look out for the medieval illuminated manuscript with a tiny, colourful drawing in the margin depicting a nun plucking phallic fruit from what can only be described as a penis tree. You’ll find it through the flagellation room and past the bordello guidebooks on the left. You may need to elbow a few grannies out of the way, though.

Image: Création c -album, photographie Alain Goustard/BNF, architecte Dominique Perrault © Adagp, Paris 2007

Snap

Why do we take photos? The one above, for example. I took this just over a week ago, as I arrived in the South Pacific rapture of l’Ile des Pins in New Caledonia. Was it not enough for me to stand awestruck and drink in the stupendous turquoise beauty of the scene? Why did I have to imprison it in pixels before running across the talcum-fine sand and sighing into aquamarine bliss?

I think the first reason lies in the “pinch me” reflex: a need to capture visual evidence of having really experienced such a too-good-to-be-true place. Could this really be happening? Better take a photo to make sure, to produce as Exhibit A when I wake up from my holiday-dream. Hey presto: paradise proved.

The second reason is, of course, so that you can show others. Not from some sadistic “look where I’ve been nyer-nyerdy-nyer-nyer” impulse. (Well, not always. Although I must say it did give me a thrill to feel everyone crane their necks in our wintry Parisian café as I showed LSP my vacation photos on the laptop. Even the impassive waiter hovered excessively, taking much longer than usual with the cruet and bread.) Our essential human urge, when faced with the good fortune of finding such perfection, is to share it. As freely and broadly as possible.

I was lucky enough to be able to discover this breathtaking place with my Mum and my sister, which made it even more priceless through our shared, gleeful disbelief. (Indelible, heart-swelling memories of happiness which burst to the surface the instant I look at our pictures.) But for all those dear to me who weren’t there, I have this image for you. Isn’t it wonderful? I hope it makes you feel the same warmth I feel when I look at it.

And one day, may we stand together, grinning, in front of an equal splendour, and take a photo of it.

P.S. Thank you for your continued interest in this blog, and sorry for taking such a long break. I was so touched when in Australia to have so many of you ask when my next entry was going to be. Now that I’m back in my Parisian garret after such a lovely time in Summer, I hope you’ll keep checking in and not be too disappointed.