We'll Always Have Paris (28 page)

My very first post is about needing to go to the dentist and after that, I write in rapid succession about the music they play on the Brussels métro, French reality TV, the fact that
Greggs, the low-rent British bakery, has opened an outlet in Brussels and an incident in the schoolyard where I am informed about an outbreak of penis-waving among the children. I have plenty of
good anecdotes saved up from the previous few years, stories of madness and grief and getting poked with walking sticks by Parisians, and I write them down, mixed up with sillier, frothier things:
tales of tram encounters, domestic squalor, the maddening frustrations of life with small children. There is a lot of nostalgia for Yorkshire and some contemplation of shoes and novelty
chocolate.

It turns out I love writing. It is such a pleasure, so much so that it seems bizarre to me that I haven’t ever tried it before. I haven’t written anything since university apart from
long emails to Kate and my law friend Laurie, in which I try to extract the last dregs of comedy from office life. Sometimes, in the throes of the worst or most ridiculous times in my life, I have
imagined awful incidents reframed as fiction, but it has always seemed like a distant dream or an idea for retirement. Being a writer is just a fantasy, impossibly difficult and inaccessible,
something you daydream about. How do people
do
that? My stepmother has one friend who is a journalist and sometimes I imagine . . . what? Pressing something I have written into her hands?
It’s ridiculous; I’ve only met her twice.

But of course, the Internet has changed everything, cracking open a closed shop: online writing is exploding. The blogs I read are almost exclusively by people who have no professional writing
experience and they are fresh and unguarded and funny. That unmediated, unedited immediacy is compelling for a reader but also for a writer: I feel caught up in that excitement and I write all the
time, in notebooks and in my head, late at night and on my lunch break. I am full of words, English words, things I have never said out loud or half remember from childhood, snippets of poems,
phrases from P. G. Wodehouse, and jokes. I feel sort of myself again; perhaps more myself than I have ever been.

Writing for pleasure is one part of the blog; writing for an audience is even better. Because the Internet, it turns out, is my new French
Elle
: it is where everyone who likes the same
stuff as me hangs out and, better than French
Elle
, they want to talk back. People comment and react and email and I am gradually drawn into a vivid community of funny, eccentric
introverts who have strong feelings about cake and P. G. Wodehouse, patent leather shoes and capybaras. A significant number of them even know about Bettys and Barnitts hardware store (the York
diaspora is surprisingly over-represented on the Internet). From my francophone bubble, those shared frames of reference feel precious. There are people out there in the ether who have read the
same books and listened to the same music as me. Sometimes I make an offhand reference to some obscure indie group of my teenage years or quote a favourite book and am astonished at the number of
people who recognize and respond.

The things I write about, whether it’s missing London or the weirdness of grief, or a self-coruscating confession of some act of stupidity, always seem to generate an answering echo from
someone – a virtual ‘me too’. I quickly become the perfect example of online disinhibition, that new phenomenon: I say things on the blog I can’t imagine ever saying to
anyone face to face and I am rewarded for it by that answering echo, so I do it again and again. The blog comment box creates a safe space and in it, people confess to hopeless crushes and doomed
love affairs, financial incompetence, petty acts of unkindness and secret ones of revenge. It’s giddying to discover them: there are people out there who are just as confused and tentative,
chaotic and scared, as I am. Corporate law did not throw up very many of those, but here they are: clever, funny and awkward, hanging out on the Internet, hiding red bills and unable to make a
phone call without half a day’s preparation. Loopy stories emerge: there’s a woman who keeps relics of her unrequited love for her best friend (including a used chip fork) under her bed
and another woman who sabotages her horrible husband’s collection of fountain pens in secret.

A lot of the people who comment seem to be isolated by circumstance or geography and, like me, this is where they make connections: this corner of the Internet is populated by people living away
from their homelands or otherwise lost in some way. For me and for some of them, the blog becomes a warm, dysfunctional, hug of belonging. The hard core of regular commenters are completely real to
me: I worry about Red Shoes’ medical problems and Kath’s grumpy husband and I get a clear sense, too, that they worry about me. People send me things: chocolate pigs from Bettys, books
and cards and weird home-made crafts.

Better even than the comments and the parcels is the discovery that you can actually make friends – real, proper friends – online. My first is Helen – online moniker
‘Violet Trefusis’ – who writes me a long email quoting extensively from Bertie Wooster’s speech to Roderick Spode in
The Code of the Woosters
and adding some
thoughts about the hypothetical political leanings of various brands of luxury shoe (‘tomato patent leather is screamingly fascist’). We strike up a correspondence that soon becomes a
real friendship of drunken dinners and rueful breakfasts, punctuated with poetry, anecdotes from the world of luxury magazines where she works, and confidences. She is elegant and wistful, kind and
funny, and her life is unimaginably glamorous viewed from suburban Brussels: I feel a bit star-struck knowing her.

Soon after that both Helen and I meet Tom, a London art student who calls me his adoptive mother (‘Waffle mère’, which makes me sound like a Lake District B&B) and starts
to send me silly Photoshop images and absurd crafts (‘I have just made a Mexican Day of the Dead gingerbread house with a roof of shattered Dorito shards,’ he emails me one day). Next a
man called Benjamin sends me a short film of an owl riding a skateboard and a follow-up selection of acerbically funny complaints about Belgian life (sample: ‘I have just seen a shoeless man
on the métro at Louise carrying his own poo in a plastic bag’). He is a stylish New Yorker perplexed by exile in Brussels, a lawyer and a lover of absurdity and animals, and we
exchange gleeful daily emails on Belgian life and meet for drinks. There are many more: Lydia and Lindsay, Frances, Kathy, Maija and Simon, people who go from a tiny thumbnail picture of a dog or a
cake to becoming real flesh and blood friends. At blog meet-ups in London pubs and shy coffee dates in Brussels parks I forge more friendships than I ever have, more than at Oxford, where I was
always disappearing to Normandy, and more than in London, where I put paid to a social life by getting pregnant at twenty-six.

As my world expands with all these clever, funny people I realize just how starved of fun I have been. I laugh more in that first year of blogging than I have for a decade, easily, and at the
silliest things. Everything is just
so
silly: I run a virtual Village Fête on the blog over the summer and people carve me horrifying vegetable animals and bake ugly cakes. I
instigate weekly Confessionals, where everyone admits to their daft transgressions. The ‘me too’, the answering echo of the Internet, becomes immensely, probably excessively,
important.

Most important of all, though, is Madevi, my new best friend.

I first encounter Madevi via her cartoon dinosaur alter ego on Twitter and via the blog, where she issues me with a challenge to take two inflatable plastic dinosaurs into my office and pretend
to have a meeting with them. I wimp out on the challenge, but soon after that, she emails me. ‘I am the Mother of Dinosaurs,’ the email starts (she is the co-creator of a cartoon series
featuring two dinosaurs in corporate middle management), which is promising, and then goes on to describe a horrifying tax situation in which she is embroiled. Madevi is a few years younger than
me; she works as an animator and describes herself as ‘a Frenchie exiled in Scotland for the past ten years’. I reply, she writes back and soon we are emailing and chatting online
multiple times a day.

I have never encountered anyone who loves so many of the things I love, or who shares my sense of humour so closely. We soon establish that we agree about almost everything except jelly (she
loathes it) and
galettes des rois
(I hate them). In the first few weeks of knowing her we talk about breadmaking videos, Fred Vargas, special cellulite pants, why ham is considered a
vegetable in France, whether Bonne Maman or La Laitière make the best crème caramels, our respective credit card debts and weird crushes, her job folding scarves at Hermès,
childhood comfort blankets and the best places for éclairs in Paris. We talk endlessly, greedily, without awkwardness or ever getting bored. We discuss writing, and gossip about people on
the Internet, and every day – every single day – we discuss what is for lunch. Everything makes us laugh: jugglers, awful French rap, Internet acquaintances. She starts writing an
advice column for my blog, taking on the persona of an easily angered, plain-speaking capybara, Dr Capybara, who has no time for middle-class whining, which becomes enormously popular.

It is quickly inconceivable for us to spend a day without talking. What I especially love about Madevi is that when we talk, I can just say or write whatever comes into my head in French or
English. Our chats are a delicious, lazy mix of both languages, in which I can write something to her like: ‘Louis has just told me a chicken called Fleurette came to school on an educational
visit today. All he would tell me was that its tongue is “
pointue
” and its
crête
is “
très chaude
”.’

. . . and she understands. We finish each other’s sentences, riff off each other’s jokes and know exactly what absurdities will make the other laugh. When one of us is being
self-indulgently gloomy, the other one croons Brassens’ ‘
Le Petit Cheval Blanc
’, the saddest song in the world about the death of a brave, hard-working horse who never
gets to see the sun, at them.

It’s a completely new experience, playing with both languages in this way, and when I talk to her, something feels reconciled, as if I can be completely myself.

Of course, I should be able to have that feeling with Olivier. After all our years in London, his English is excellent and we could be this playful, this free in the way we speak to each other,
but we aren’t. We’re stuck in our habits, our French-speaking habits (it was his Frenchness I fell for initially, after all, so I hang on to it now), and frankly, we’re hardly
talking at all, because that seems safest.

One of the things I find myself confessing to often on the blog is problems with Olivier: arguments, disapproval from him and small acts of defiance from me. An undertone runs through the first
eighteen months of the blog’s life of a relationship in deepening crisis, even though I try to play it for laughs.

Olivier did not seem bothered when I started the blog and was happy to help me out with various bits of silliness, but as the months have gone by, he has become less and less comfortable with
the hours I spend blogging and the weekends I spend trying to carve out time to hide away with my laptop. He doesn’t understand the confessional impulse at all and while he doesn’t
actively disapprove, the way my world is expanding and my hunger for new connections jar with his own current instinct, which is to circle the wagons, to keep the family close and safe. It is 2008
and the world is spinning into catastrophic financial meltdown: Lehman Brothers collapses and the sub-prime catastrophe plays out week after week on the news, an unnerving snowball of economic
doom, gathering speed. I feel expansive and excited about life, busy making myself a beard out of Post-It notes because I hope it will make some people on the Internet laugh, but Olivier is
anxious. As the British government scrabbles to bail out the banking sector, I am blogging my failed attempt to make a papier-mâché dinosaur or carving a large courgette into a
crocodile. Olivier is glued to the news and wondering whether to put our money into a safe deposit box. We are further apart now than at any point in our relationship, I think. It is apparently not
conducive to conjugal harmony to come home worried that the world financial system is imploding and to find your partner adding fondant teeth to a cake in the shape of the Belgian politician Guy
Verhofstadt.

I am looking outwards, I tell myself, while he looks in. But in looking outwards, I also look away: from him, from the family, from our life. Every incident and exchange becomes material and I
frame and reframe things in my head to make them as pithy and entertaining as possible. I mine chore-filled family weekends and exasperating evenings with the boys, who are funny and maddening and
wonderful, for comedy. It makes them easier to tolerate, but it also keeps me somehow separate: I am presenting family life as a spectator sport, not fully taking part, and Olivier knows it. When
he tries, eventually, to suggest I curb my online time, I get sullen and mutinous: how dare he try and spoil my fun?

To avoid conflict, the time we spend together becomes necessarily very bland. We deal with the practical necessities of parenting (we do not even necessarily agree on these) and when we are
alone together, we sit on the sofa and watch French reality TV, shows full of sound and fury and manufactured outrage. The mainstream French channels have recently woken up to the potential of
imported formats and our screen is full of ersatz
Supernannies
and
Weakest Links
.

We watch
Koh-Lanta
(French
Survivor
), in which twenty French people (sometimes there is a token Belgian who is rapidly ejected) are dropped on a desert island and have to try
and survive on their wits and a dwindling quantity of rice by dint of endless arguing, aided by the scout-master-style encouragement of presenter Denis Brogniart, in sensible Rohan slacks. Grown
men are reduced to tears as a saucisson is dangled tantalizingly before them, then snatched away if they can’t balance on a log for long enough. We watch
Un Dîner Presque
Parfait
, the French
Come Dine With Me
, in which, boringly, everyone behaves impeccably. There are no scenes of shameful drunkenness and no fights. No one says things like ‘I
can’t eat lamb because it’s cute’ or ‘I don’t eat vegetables’ or ‘what’s a mille . . . foy?’ and no snakes defecate on the dining table. In
Un Dîner Presque Parfait
, even feckless early twenties ravers will comment seriously on whether the table decorations were appropriate and have an opinion on the use of deep-fried
leeks in the starter. The ‘entertainment’ is extraordinarily straight-laced too, parlour games, the re-enactment of local traditions and
le rock ’n’ roll
dancing.