Bonjour

at it again

Bonjour mes petits,

I have adjourned to the City of Light again. It is very nice, except the man at the local Franprix supermarket has twigged that my francais is not très bon and so he has begun saluting me in English and asking me if I would like a “ticket” after he processes my payment. This is to be regarded as problématique.

I have done a week of French lessons and, surprisingly, I can carry myself in certain situations. I’m somewhere between an A2 and a B1 level of French, for those of you who are familiar with the CEFR. More saliently, I am getting a general look at Paris, and I met a group of compatriots who have moved here. Listening to them speak, I was interested by how far removed they seem from Irish concerns. Back home, everyone talks about the housing ladder and how to get on it, or how to find a good rental. Here, divorced from such concerns, they spoke mostly about good restaurants and where to go out and what it’s like speaking French, and so on.

It was bizarre for me because, in the alternate reality of “living” (albeit temporarily) in a new country, I too was liberated of my concern for status games, which seem to be the preserved focus of certain persons in certain environments. Does that make them any easier to deal with when I go home? I think yes, in a way, given that I know I can always get away from them, even if only temporarily.

That’s a great thing about travel – it contextualises the little concerns which otherwise come to fill up the whole of our concern, and pester us unrelentingly. You really can just get up and go, after all.

They have a good thing going, here. They are well-dressed, while at the same time retaining the possibility that their appearance was achieved with minimum artifice – the sogennante “chic-décontracté.” Their fashions, like their woes, are very much contextualised – adopting a similar style in many lower-key cities would more than likely invite ridicule, as it would look out of place. What is a man to do? There is not much he can do (you can’t beat the machine).

Finally, I wrote this newsletter presently simply because the notion took me. I have been wondering about my fiction writing (I am struggling, reader), and whether I should take on a more décontraté attitude towards it? I tend to get blogged down in plot points and fixing things, because that seems like the responsible thing to do. Maybe I should simply write whatever I feel like or wherever my energy or aliveness is leading me – in any case it is worth a shot, and might make me stop dreading the page.

In contrast, writing the “newsletter” here is generally a self-indulgent delight. I hope you too are delighted.

À la prochaine,

Edward