Back to the big buzzing tent

Going home after going home

Dear Friend, 

I hope you’ve rolled into September gently and are feeling reasonably optimistic about the autumn to come. 

I am writing to you from the last day of a long trip to the UK, back to the homeland. When I first moved to Paris, I used to come back often – every six weeks or so, and dipping in and out of London and Paris life was part of my normal rhythm. But during the pandemic, once I made the decision to stay in my Paris home, France became HQ in a more meaningful way. 

I now tend to have the inside-outside perspective of someone who is from here but no longer totally of here. 

I keep noticing little things that maybe I wouldn't have noticed so actively before. In this letter I am often recounting things I notice that are typically French, that could only happen in France – but I now also find myself noticing things that could only happen in London/the UK. 

Some sights and sounds I’ve enjoyed from over the past two weeks: 

• The new King Charles mural by Hounslow East station. (A sequel to a nearby work of the Queen, created upon her death, which some have unkindly said resembles retired football manager Alex Ferguson more than our late monarch; Google ‘Queen mural Hounslow’). 

• “Sorry, I was just making a TikTok!”. The words sheepishly  spoken by a teenage boy, embarrassed when my mum and dog and I walked past; he’d just been angrily rapping into his iPhone camera with a joint in his hand.

• “You better not go to Magaluf, otherwise me and you are done!”. A young woman recounting what she told her boyfriend, to her friend. 

•  “Oh wow, gosh!” - the reaction of a walker in a tearoom in Shropshire when I said I lived in Paris.

• “Freedom!” - the cry of a young girl I heard on the train leaving Birmingham, whom I later learned was called Bel Bel, after the train took a very long time to leave. 

I wrote these quotes and moments down on the Notes app on my phone, along with this passing thought:

This felt very profound and very right to me as I typed it. When I began to try to explain the idea to a friend, expanding the simile further, it started to feel less suave than it had in my head.

A few days later, I was doing a repetitive work task and decided to simultaneously listen along to an interview with revered writer and all-round sage Zadie Smith (it’s always a good idea to do so, but I had also seen a poster advertising a signing she was doing in a bookshop near Piccadilly Circus). My ears pricked up listening to her descriptions of coming back to live in her native London after more than a decade in New York.

“It’s like a merry-go-round, you have to have the guts to get of…I’m very very glad to be home. I love New York, but I was getting deracinated out of existence. To me writers are also local beings and for me it’s been just incredibly nutritious to be home, to hear English voices of all kinds, of all classes, of all races — to be back in my…world.

…this was the way that for hundreds and hundreds of years, everybody lived. You lived where you were born, in the community you came from, you lived and died there.

She goes on to link her experience of coming back home to her concerns about the way we consume technology, and how it might jar with how our bodies are used to living.

“So it’s just an interesting mindset for me. I’m always interested in things on a human scale, because I know the world is transformed, the phone in your pocket has transformed everything — but the brain itself is still this same old brain…and it can only take so much.”

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It’s Rentrée time

But before you get the impression I’m about to cancel my return trip to Paris, let me tell you just how much I am looking forward to the Rentrée!

La Rentrée: For the French, La Rentrée is the necessary second-part of the vacances ritual.

If I were to try and translate it, the closest I could get is probably “back-to-school”, but this is not really sufficient. It’s an all-ages, all-purpose back for school, because it also goes for adults returning to work, people who do not work at all, or retirees. What’s more, it’s also inked into the cultural calendar as long-awaited books hit the shelves and the next blockbuster exhibitions open. It comes from the French verb rentrer, to come home, so maybe it’s better translated as a kind of homecoming?.

September in Paris, when everyone comes back well rested after their breaks, is generally wonderful. The baker beams at you with reinvigorated energy, parents swap holiday details at the school gates, Parisians gather on café-terraces and catch up with friends and colleagues. It shows you the point of the quiet August.

Here are a few things happening this month in Paris/France:

• The city’s ban on rental e-scooters come into force

• Macron’s pension reforms are coming into action 

• Rugby World Cup

• Grape harvest 

• King Charles is visiting

And here are just a few things I’m looking forward to:

• Catching up with friends

• Meeting my friends’ new baby, who was born during les vacances

• Re-starting my weekly art class

• Going back to my gym and enjoying the ‘new year’ vibes

• Walks in pleasant September weather

• Speaking French again

• Going back to the local dog park

• Autumn exhibitions (more on these next week)

• Seeing Paris again

Cheerful dog pals

Cheerful onions

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Thirty-second book club

I’ve been surfing a reading wave this week in the UK. For my birthday, my uncle gave me Paris in Turmoil: A City between Past and Future, by French writer, publisher and former surgeon Eric Hazan. As you can imagine, it was very much up my street, and I hope to write more about it another time.

I have also read two very good works of fiction, very different to each other. First, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, a gracefully written novella that carefully and all too effectively tells the story of some of the darkest chapters of Ireland’s recent history, and the Catholic Church’s treatment of vulnerable women. Less by Andrew Sean Greer, also a birthday gift from my sister-in-law, is a bouncy, witty ball of a book that made me laugh out loud, made me think and brought me joy.

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Et voilà ! That will do for this week. I hope you have a good Rentrée, if that feels appropriate where you are, or else just a good old-fashioned week!

If you enjoy this letter, please do consider sharing it with one more person you think will like it. I would be delighted if you did!

Yours,

Hannah