Blue Dress Hot Mess

Series: The Paris Diaries: 12/03/25

Notes for the confused reader: Gabriel (Gabe) is a dog, not a child. This is a collection of pieces from my notebook, typed up; as such, some is written in real-time, some with the benefit of hindsight. It is fragmentary, but so is my mind. If something says (FA) in brackets, read: French Accent.

Paris is bitterly cold once more. My fingers are clamped around my pencil to write. I have so much to write, and nothing new at the same time. We have been here exactly 1 month today. Living here, just being here, has become a normality: I still take pleasure in Paris – though it smells, today, of the insides of a chicken farm; I still laugh at the children having their PE lesson inside the walls of the Louvre Palace; I still have my breath taken at the majesty of the buildings, and I still seem to attract men in pistachio-coloured trousers and tortoiseshell rim spectacles who smile indulgently at Gabriel in the street. But as I sit here in yet another coffee shop – this one halfway between home and Montmartre, tucked between a noodle-shop and a Bistro on an unobtrusive hill, serving rose flavoured matchas and pretty flowers in copper vases – I realise finally that this is where I live. I am not a visitor. I am not even sure if I am still the inconnue. I am a girl living in Paris, and I like it that way. It is not home in the sense of bed socks and cups of tea, or in having a favourite mug (though I do always sit at the same place around the kitchen table). It is not home in any sentimental way, in knowing the exact number of stairs or having scratches in the wall where you’ve lumped a heavy suitcase along the corridor en route to an early-morning flight. It is where I live. Where I sit and watch telly, where I write, where I cook. It is where I hosted the smallest dinner party of five (about all the flat allows) and it is where I cannot wait to return to in the evenings, just to inhabit, just to be. Perhaps this is what it feels like to no longer have a childhood attachment to the building which offers a roof over your head. To have no image of myself there, in that wood-beam space on the very top floor, other than the image I am living now. No memories cloud the present day. The image is moving – a film. A livestream. Uncut, unedited, certainly undirected. I produce it. Me: à Paris. The Paris Diaries. One month old.

(Two Australian girls are sitting behind me; I think they are au pairs. They have started an expat’s Book Club, and, having complained about their respective French wards (or, mainly, said wards’ fearsome mothers, who spend €150 “on lunch!” but refuse to buy les enfants new school shoes), they finally got round to discussing their books. This doesn’t last long (in the time it took me to write, they are gossiping again); they are back to fearsome French mothers, and prospective universities. Waitlists and ‘schools’ (AA: Australian accent, clipped and youthful) seem very far away from 7° Paris on a Wednesday).

Gabriel has eaten the carpet. We’ll have to leave before someone notices.

I lay last night in the kind of wide-awake exhaustion which makes your brain run marathons. I listened – it was hard not to hear – to some neighbours throwing a football-watch party in the flat below. Liverpool vs Paris Saint-Germain. For the second time in my life (the first was the World Cup – 2018? – France v. England. We drank champagne with my French exchanges and washed the horses in our bikinis in the final, watching the telly through the open doors of the house. I remember the heat being sweltering, and it not mattering who won because there were two French girls and two English girls and we had champagne and horses so nothing else really seemed to matter. We thought Mbappé was very good looking) I felt invested in football. I heard every kick, every groan, the excitement of going into extra time (“More drinks! Allez, allez, allez!”). I lay alone in my double bed on the mezzanine at my studio flat, and listened, smiled, felt it was just so-very-meant-to-be, as Paris Saint-Germain beat Liverpool on penalties. I lay in Paris Saint-Germain. My local team. My local team in the Champions League. I have never visited Liverpool.

(The roars from the flat below would have woken me even if I have been sleeping. No matter the nationality, it seems, football fans sing. And no matter the nationality, it seems, they sing extremely badly).

I have to carry Gabriel between the front door and the gates onto the street. I was told off yesterday, properly, by the landlady, and she is unpleasant and terrifying. A dark haired witch. Her accent is thick with Paris and cigarettes. No compassion for the petite fille anglaise. No care. I think she’s the only person in Paris who dislikes my dog. Like I say, witch. Her dark hair has streaks of grey. She is older than I first gave her credit for. She rides a bike not a broomstick. Witch.

I feel certain; I feel calm. Gabriel is now asleep, lying over the hole he has torn in the carpet as though that will mean I haven’t noticed it. A month ago today I had never been to the Rue de Lille; I had never sat in a coffee shop, enclosed in my own world, just writing. I had never lived truly alone. Gabriel had not been in a train, nor in a lift (which he now waits for with stoic patience when he needs the loo in the morning. If he could, I know he’d like to push the buttons). I had no idea what I was going to feed him, whether I really spoke French. (The latter is still up for debate but at the very least I try). And I – well, I had never said, outright, in so many plain and simple words, that I am a writer. I had never shared my writing. I had never thought, not even once, that it would be so comfortable, being here. It is not cake-batter home. It is double-espresso home, and the biscuits are definitely shop-bought. But that feels more grown-up, somehow.

Postscript:

Maybe one day I will find a man who takes me to Chartier and Cartier all in one afternoon. I know I could aspire to take myself – and on some level I do; but I like the idea of someone doing it for me. For me. Because shallow though I know I am, I truly believe that that would be my kind of dream après-midi. We would eat at Chartier in the Grand Boulevards, then wander slowly up towards l’Opéra where we’d stand looking in shop windows while tourists and cars and noise and Paris rushes us by. We would ignore it all, shrouded in our own world like Audrey Hepburn at the beginning of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’. Then we would walk to the Place Vendôme. There, two lovers in a wide empty square, we would look at diamonds. Diamonds and diamonds, endless constellations of earthbound stars. One day. One day, I might wear a star on my finger, and never have to let daylight remove its gleam. I would never take it off. My Chartier-Cartier star.