Feel free to read, watch or listen as you choose
I’ve more to add to my post-traumatic growth series of blogs - but today just wasn’t the day. I needed to take a breath, bask in the nervous excitement of the-day-before-travel. Tomorrow I fly out to Paris for five weeks of research, writing, working, catching up with friends and getting started on the next book project. Which is set, in, well, France.
What an immense privilege it is to be able to travel. How lucky, lucky, lucky I feel to be able to return to a city I first visited in 1979, where I looked as if I was thoroughly loathing every minute. (Top left image). Being 14 is hard, am I right?
Back as a 27-year-old in Versailles in 1992, I’m reading Jane Austen, yet again, and caught in an action shot. (Top right image).
There was a thirty year gap before I returned to France in 2022, (bottom left image) where for an eye-watering sum my sister and I travelled a short distance between wherever we were when we saw the woman and her horse and buggy, and the Eiffel Tower. My sister had only just tolerated the heinous price tag for the short ride, but once we were turfed out at the Eiffel Tower, still shrieking with laughter about who knows what, she realised that was a per head cost. But what can one do, but pay the extortionate piper and move on? And get a selfie with the Tower, of course.
2025 I was back, but not to Paris, instead straight to Toulouse and the unsuccessful French writing retreat (which you can read about here, should you want to). The one I fled from, booked a car and drove to Biarritz, (bottom right image).
When we travel, we take our past selves with us, like a Russian doll of trip experiences expanding ever outwards. At 14, I was completely dependant. At 27, I was driven around by my boyfriend of the time. In 2022, I still hadn’t tackled driving on the right hand side of the road. But by 2025, I was alight with the freedom that hiring a car brings to a holiday.
So here’s to the night before leaving, to travel, to expansion, to La Belle France and of course, writing.
