I had the windows open Friday afternoon, and the new Strokes album playing, loud, into the springtime blue. There were pie crusts in the oven, mushrooms on the chopping board, and a row of oranges on the sill for a something-sweet-for-after. In time they came tumbling up and in, Nai, whom I’d wanted to come first, and who did; Seung Yun, whose housewarming present I’d killed earlier this month, and who I hoped wouldn’t notice; Bastien, whose arrival was heralded by me leaning out the window and yelling into the street that he’d found the right place. There was Kris whose wardrobe I covet and Olivier who will have to be Olivier bis; Dan with stories of giraffes and hippopotamuses and crocodiles, with tales of Hugh Laurie–style lords lording it about in Africa; Marc always taller than I remember him, and Emily in a big, floaty scarf that made all the girls say “Oooh.” And Emily, bless, Emily brought a bag hefty with brownies, and icing sugar, even, for dusting. She took the plastic baggie of powder out of her purse, and I said, “You brought me cocaine?” and I was surprised that my move to Europe sure has opened me up to that seamy underworld my mother warned me about some eleven years ago as I left behind the hamlet in which I’d spent my cloistered youth. “No sex, no booze, no drugs,” she’d said, as she’d packed me off at the airport—and I think she e-mailed me the same not too long after, just to have it in writing.

So, but. The windows Friday afternoon, and the Strokes, heralding the weekend of madness and wonder. There was the soup spilled, the wineglass shattered, the strong coffees in little cups. There was the call for whiskey, and the discovery of a bottle of Gammel Dansk Bitter Dram. “What is this?” we wondered, and I said, because it was true, “I don’t know.” “It came with the apartment,” I said, and then we Googled it, because this is what the Internet was created for. Twenty-nine herbs, spices and flowers is what it is, apparently, and the Gammel Dansk Web site adds: “The recipe remains a secret and is known only to three people on Earth. But the pleasure it gives is universal.”

“Get on the Jack Daniels Web site,” Marc said, “and see if they’re as poetic.” But then we were quickly distracted by how much twenty-nine herbs, spices and flowers taste like an ancient Chinese remedy for aching joints. We were slipping off the sofas soon after, and lounging about on the carpet, and then Marc and Nai both did their party tricks, and then Marc mimed me digging myself out of a hole and backpedalling at the same time—that old thing about my mouth speaking before my brain—and then it was time to call it a night.

Saturday there was no time for drawing packing lists, because there was a party to clean up after, plus, anyway, how do you pack for one night? I threw my toothbrush in a bag and walked across Waterloo Bridge to the Eurostar terminal carrying a bottle of Champagne for Maud and a bar of chocolate for Panda, because they have neither in France.



The sun set in London and the train pulled into Paris in time for dinner. Nine o’clock and the crêpe machine sat ready on the big table chez Hector et les collocs. “Non mais c’est la maison du bonheur,” I said, and then I went to the loo and found a copy of Glamour. “Et c’est les toilettes du bonheur,” Maud said. Rémi muttered something about there being better, and then magicked a copy of Us Weekly into my grasping hands. “Je bouge jamais,” I said, and I flipped the pages to see how the stars are just like us.

Twenty-four hours in Paris like a stash of strawberry Pop Rocks. Up the curving wood staircase at Panda’s, red lights curling round white cornices, and the sounds of Saturday night pouring into the street. There was a girl in a black top with white polka dots, and a girl in a white top with black polka dots. There was a girl with wild hair and many necklaces, and when she grinned, her eyes grinned too. It was very smoky, and very warm, and the deejays at their turntable were spinning, spinning. If you closed your eyes there was only the music and the beat you felt all over.

Later, in the quiet, there was rum, and sweet clementines. Later, there was Gonzales and Set Luna, and Sunday dawning. Later, still, there was an afternoon stroll, and a hand in a hand, and a small paper sack holding two croissants au beurre.

I would tell you more, but in ten minutes I have to go catch the train to Paris for a Saturday-night party. Masja who cuts my hair this morning couldn’t stop smiling because I couldn’t stop smiling.

This morning on the way to work, I saw a man who looked like the weather. I saw a candy shop, a blackbird of a boy, a small forest of stout chimneys. I saw me, in a window, and I was in red. I saw windows. (I like windows.) If you walk fast enough, the cold gets left behind.

Last Friday I started blogging, and then I don’t know what happened, I got distracted by, like, life or something like it. Like the butcher who backed into his meat slicer, I have gotten a little behind in my work. I have all these little bits and pieces of blog entries that make it no further than a Word document, and I need to weave them together into some sort of crazy quilt. Your crazy butcher aunt’s crazy quilt.

So, but, this is what we’ll do, okay? We’ll do a weekend montage. We like montages. I remember when I was watching “New York Minute” with Jeff, and he said “I smell a montage coming!” and then there they were, Mary-Kate and Ashley being made over in a black-people’s hair salon like only black people know how to make a girl over. Or somethin.



1/

SW1 is the postcode for fancy pants; it is the postcode for Harrods, which is meh, and it is the postcode for Harvey Nicks, which is oh-yes-please. So the fact that Brompton Road, at a quarter to nine in the morning, smells like sweet, sweet doughnuts is either completely unexpected or completely fitting, I don’t know which yet.

I got off the number fourteen bus Friday morning and thought I smelt doughnuts. The scent was faint, still, but I followed the sugared air to the back of Harrods, where it seemed to thicken, like syrup. My feet, in pointy purple flats, sounded like thinking: Click...click? Click? ...Click? Click-click? Click-click! Click-click-click-click-click-click!

The Krispy Kreme sign explained all, eventually, but a girl has no time for Krispy Kremes—not the Original Glazed, not the Glazed Sour Cream, not even the Glazed Chocolate Cake—

(are your eyes glazing over yet?)—

the thing is, a girl’s got no time for Krispy Kremes when she’s got a breakfast date at Ladurée.

The waitstaff were dressed better than we were, and it was terribly genteel, at a quarter to nine in the morning. We had fancy upholstered chairs in stripes, with very tiny wheels on the bottoms of their legs. A terribly genteel place where the waitstaff are dressed better than you, where the chairs have tiny wheels as if they were landed gentry with monocles on their high-boned noses, assumes that the silverware will be good and heavy, and the porcelain will be fine and rimmed in gold. These are good assumptions. Also good is the assumption that at some point, manoeuvring over the eggs, I made Suzzan drop her good, heavy fork on the fine, gold-rimmed porcelain. Did you assume, too, that the grand clatter was accompanied by our fluttered “OH!” ? You are correct.

“We are bringing down the tone of this place,” Suz said, but I told her that’d already been achieved by the Krispy Kreme smell that kept wafting in from the rest of the Harrods food hall. That didn’t stop her from saying, when Henny rang later: “We’re in Paris!” because, I mean, still.

The bonus dream-sequence part of this montage is when I said to Suzzan, because Suzzan is a paediatric nurse: “Hey, if you were at work and you opened the door to the baby room and all the babies had wings and were sort of flying around, and there were also macarons with wings flying around in the room, would you just sort of close the door quietly behind you and walk away?” and Suzzan said: “I would take one macaron, and then I would close the door and say, ‘We have a situation.’”

I’m not sure what the music to this montage is; maybe something by Pink Martini, or maybe the French-Afro beat-heavy something they started playing at Ladurée just as I picked up my phone to make a Very Professional Phone Call to an HR person. Suz and Hens both suggested the restrooms instead, and certainly it was quiet in there while I was dialling the number, but by the time I’d punched in all the digits, a girl’d come in, singing, and then flushing. Later, still waiting for a good moment to ring, I was stuck on a rattly bus heading West to Olympia while I jiggled my foot with nervousness and impatience. I thought: “Maybe I will make the call while this bus sits in traffic,” so of course right then the police sirens came screaming down the street while a woman on the pavement started to yell “Fuck you! FUCK YOU!”

2/

The weekend the boy came to visit, there was a lemon tart waiting on the windowsill, a lemon tart that got eaten, bit by bit, over the weekend, with enough left over to give a hunk to Hens and John when we met for Sunday dim sum, and enough still to nosh on, so many of us lying bellies-down on the carpet, when Bastien and Panda and Jeanne rolled in.

Emily had said, before Olive got in, “You have to plan the weekend, but make it look like it was all casual,” but I’d said, “No, no, it’s chill, you know, it’s cool.” But now I see she knew what she was talking about, because when you sit around thinking It’s chill, it’s cool, what happens is, the boy wants to go to Portobello Market, and you say, Yah! Okay!, and then all of a sudden, even though you are holding two maps, the street you were heading for, all chill and cool, is now twenty minutes in the wrong direction and you have no idea where to get the bloody bus.

We found the number ninety-four, finally, and Portobello Market, and there were a tomato tart and fancy fruit juices, and then a loaf of rosemary bread for after. There could have been a T-shirt, as well, that said “Nobody knows I’m a lesbian” but the boy wasn’t having it.

This weekend when the boy came to visit, there was a walk through Green Park to take pictures with the bobbies. There were so many sneakers, for boys and for girls, at the Adidas store, and there could have been a massacre at Fortnum & Mason but we ran out of time.

That weekend, too, there was Champagne at dinner, and Nutella and rose jam at breakfast. There were very strong macchiati at Bar Italia, where Luca behind the zinc bar raised his arms in the air and shouted “My love!” when we came in. On a very grey evening, the air damp with indecisive rain, there were warm friton toasts on the big red carpet with the Saturday newspaper.

I think I’m setting this montage to the entire Life album by the Cardigans, because it makes a girl feel good, like a weekend when the boy comes to visit. That part, though, at the end, when we realise it’s half an hour later than we’d thought, and then all of a sudden we’re booking it down Drury Lane; that part with everyone fumbling about and kissing our good-byes, Panda and Jeanne and Bastien and Olive and me; that part where we’re all tumbling out of the cab like clowns at a circus, like monkeys from a barrel; that part when the Eurostar terminal is empty save for us skidding in through the sliding doors; that part where the Frenchies make the train with just seconds to spare—that whole last flurry is set to the music of that Kit Kat ad they used to play on TV back in the eighties, the one with the figure-skating pandas.

If you don’t have a job, what you can do is head to the Covent Garden Odeon at eleven forty-five in the morning for the cheap shows, four pounds fifty for Jake Gyllenhaal and the wide, low skies of Wyoming, USA.

“D’you want to go watch ‘Brokeback Mountain’?” Henny’d said, and I’d said, “Which?” and she’d said “With Jake—” and I’d said, “Gyllenhaal? The gay cowboy movie?” and she’d said, “I hear you’re not supposed to call it the gay cowboy movie,” which is how we ended up at the gay cowboy movie yesterday morning, Nai sending us a text that said: “How come you all watching movie in the middle of the freaking day? SO ENG AH???”

(“Brokeback Mountain”, run, do not walk, it is beautiful and good, even though within the first twenty minutes I had to lean over to Hens and whisper: “Are they speaking English?” for it turned out it is not just a gay cowboy movie but a mumbly gay cowboy movie. These boys, they slouch about like cowboys and mumble like the best of them. It’s like Cletus learn’d ’em how to speak or somethin’. When Heath Ledger ups the stakes by popping a cigarette in his pouty little mouth, it’s pointless to even try to understand what he’s going on about. Just lean back and enjoy the view.)

Being eng means being free as the birds, with the day to ourselves, with ramen soup lunches at Taro till the nice Japanese boys come to shut us down, with coffee and toasted-coconut macaroons at Foyles while we read Chinese horoscopes over the free wireless connection. “Canela? For mint tea?” we said, then, and we thought Yes, but then on the way I stopped in at Neal’s Yard Dairy for a loaf of bread, and then we were undone. Because clearly we could just as easily make mint tea at home, and if we went home we could have raisin toast, too, and cheese, and a smoked trout salad, and brownies for after. May I just say, though, in our defence, that we didn’t come completely undone, we merely unravelled a little. The cheeseman kept slicing us samples—the cheese that would go with the bread, the cheese that would go with a sweet white wine, the cheese that tasted like strawberry ice cream (it really did!), the cheese that tasted like pineapples (canned ones, in syrup)—and it was a minor miracle we only came away with a Childwickbury, light and fresh like a day of being eng.

Nai came over to be eng with us, later, and I think he tries, dear heart, to keep up, but he had to resort, I believe, more than once, as we collapsed into hearty laughter, as we beat upon the table with our fists, to asking if we’d been drinking. No, darlin’, it was just the day of being eng.

Some time in the night, I was drawing a stick figure of Audrey Tautou being the lame girl in “A Very Long Engagement” to answer a question about the movie, and Nai said “pai kah,” which of course reduced us to tears. By then John had arrived, and John is a nice Englishman, so he just watched, uncomprehendingly. “It just means ‘lame’,” we explained, “but it’s funny because it’s in Hokkien.”

“Hokkien funny meh?” I think Nai said, or at least that was the sentiment he expressed.

“Funny what,” I said. “It is so chor-lor sounding.” “But eh hallo,” I said, “not say I don’t like Hokkien—it is good for squatting. I like to squat and speak Hokkien, dunno meh?”

His hand went to his forehead, then, and he said: “Edward Said is rolling over in his grave right now.”

It’s like Suzzan brought the holidays to town with her;

(and it is better than if she’d brought the circus to town, because that would involve only peanuts, maybe, and those’d be for the elephants);

Suzzan has brought the holidays to town with her, and, full of holiday spirit, we do crazy late-night shops at Sainsbury’s—crazy late-night shops that result in pretty tins of chestnut spread, in little pots of chocolate desserts—and we come home to melt Mars bars in small saucepans of fancy milk.

The milk, I have had my eye on for a while—only because of the label; and I know it is what my mother would call, with some disdain, pian gee nah—to fool children—but I cannot help it. On normal days I buy the organic semi-skimmed, but because it is holidays, we spring for the luxe milk. I mean, please: the creamy golden milk, the pedigree cows—just put me in a plaid shirt already, and stick a shaft of wheat between my teeth. That beat in the background? It is a hoe-down.

Still, guess what, the holidays are coming to a close, because I went and got me a gig. At a children’s press, no less. Things are on the up and up! Oh, but, these things? That are on the up and up? They are not my salary. The salary is down, down, down, downer than the paychecks I get from temping. It’s FINE, let’s just call it that good ol’ inverse relationship between job meaningfulness and cold, hard cash.

At my second interview at the press, the managing director said: “...and we love your enthusiasm.” “Oh,” I said, “that’s kind of you to say.” “Yes,” she said, “when you came in last week for your interview, I was in a conference in another room, and I heard you speaking...” “Oh,” I said. “Um. Hee hee hee.”

It is not possible we laugh as much as we do.

Suz is in town for a why not, and this morning, so innocently, she said: “What are you doing for dinner tonight?” So of course come seven o’clock there was a salad chilling in the fridge, a tray of lasagna in the oven, the beginnings of a chocolate truffle tart, and Hens due any moment.

We laugh till we snort, we laugh till we cannot stand, we move from the kitchen table to the living room carpet and still we are laughing; silent, even, but laughing still.

The thing is, there are things to be happy about.

The chalkboard sign outside Konstam on Kings Cross Road said “Cute as a button”, and truly, inside, it was: heavy woodbench tables wobbling on the uneven floor, and the thumbtacks in silver and rusted spelling out a full-size elk on the corkboard wall. We were leaning over our coffees, me and Nai, and it was awfully nice in a way that rainy Sunday brunches are nice. We were wordless for being newly back in town, and wordless for Sunday morning, but that was nice too.

I wanted some chocolate, after, just a square, really, and everything on the menu looked good, but none of it looked like chocolate—it looked like eggs and mushrooms and squeak and blood pudding, but it sure didn’t look like chocolate—so we headed out into the drizzle, where an off-licence uncle sold me a Flake bar for fifty p.

’Round the corner we went up five flights on Killick Street, and the boy made tea, and we read the paper, and it was awfully nice in a way that warm Sunday kitchens are nice. And then I said “Grocery store?” and he said “Ya,” and the rain came down fine, and we avoided the puddles all the way to, HOLD ON TO YOUR HATS, THE BIGGEST SAINSBURY’S KNOWN TO MAN.

The aisles were wide, the lights were bright, it was a hypermarket to match the best America has to offer. Nai was all Meh-I-come-here-all-the-time, but I was wild-eyed, I’m sure, in the Sunday crowd, trying to make the boy buy bags of clementines on special and boxes of dodgy generic pizza and packs of chicken nuggets in the shapes of X’s and O’s. “I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself,” he said, “or at least pretending to.” But I mean, COME ON. In the face of heavy cream yoghurts in the flavour of “Raspberry Fool”, of bottles of lychee-scented ironing water, there is neither time nor space for pretence. “Oh,” I said, “you make London good,” and he let me put a box of ice creams in his basket.

This morning I want to read the New York Times; I don’t want the Guardian, with its politicians I don’t recognise, with its local news that is still not local to me; I don’t want the newly shrunken Observer; I want the New York Times in its unwieldy, large paper format and its big Sunday magazine, I want to toss out the Automobiles section, I want the Sunday Styles and whatever idiot story they have up front.

It seems like ages since I returned to London, when the truth is, if, like Tom England, I take a step back, I realise it hasn’t even been five days.

The Tom England story is this:

Yesterday, coming back from the gym,

(and, oh, yes, everything hurts, it hurts when I walk, it hurts when I climb the stairs, it hurts when I laugh—and these are things I have been doing, in vast quantities, every day),

Yesterday, coming back from the gym, I beeped in the door code and a man—dark hair; dark eyes; scruffy, but—this is the West End after all—thoughtfully so—came up from behind me on the street and entered my building with me. “This is it,” I thought, “the one day I don’t look around first to make sure I’m not being followed, this is the day I will be attacked in the hallway.” I stepped aside to let him go ahead, hedging my bets, working on a delay. His hand came out of his pocket, jangling keys, and he directed himself to one of the ground-floor apartments. Hooray for scruffy chic neighbours! “Hello,” I said, “I’m Stellou, in Flat S upstairs,” and I stuck out my hand to shake his. “Hello,” he said, “I’m—” and here he took a step back, and I don’t remember if his right arm swept the space between us in a regal arc, but at this moment of writing, it certainly seems, in my mind’s eye, that he must have,

“Hello,” he said, “I’m Tom England.” And it seemed completely natural that he’d retreated: if I had a name like Tom England, I’d give it space too.

“Oh,” I said, because I am charm and grace, “England like England.”

But, so.

England like England, and I’m still not entirely sure what I’m doing here. The nights out with Henny and John are very nice—last night, after a classic fish-and-chip dinner down the street, it was just the three of us closing down the joint at Canela, with mint teas and a slice of passionfruit cheesecake—and earlier this week Hens and I warmed the low seats at the Souk Medina; it was deep and cosy in there, with thick carpets on the floors, on the walls, and sweet hookah smell in everything; and the waitress kept bringing plates of treasures: aubergines, hummus, tabouleh, lamb, stewed carrots, on and on and on, and then a circle of baklava, I mean, we were there for hours—

the nights out are nice and all—and today there is a brunch date, which is exciting because there will be at least one of the following: (a) Nai and (b) waffles; and then tonight, unexpectedly, a pancake dinner—

so it’s not a bad life, I know, and I’m not complaining, really, but still: I wonder if it means anything, the days, the nights, all of this, I just wonder.

Couldn’t wait any longer for Random House to hire me and offer me the keys to their corporate sports centre, so I signed up today, finally, not at the big gay gym down the street where the guy giving the tour said, when he showed me the women’s change rooms and I, noting only manly men as far as the eye could see, asked if there were many women at all: “A handful...which means the change rooms will always be clean and free for you!”—

I signed up not at that gym but at the gym round the corner with the pool and all. The pool is small—twenty-one metres—and has just one slow lane and one fast lane, but the fact is, people, it is a POOL.

The first workout in six? seven? eight? months seemed to go okay; I can still touch my forehead to my knee, I can still run, the sit-ups still suck. Tomorrow everything will probably hurt to high heaven, but oh it will be a good hurt.

So, but, I was talking to my mum on the phone this afternoon, and I said, “I joined a gym. Fifty-one pounds a month,” and she said, “That is money well spent. And if you just go without a haircut, I’m sure that will take care of it.” “Hey!” I said. “I need my haircuts!” “Aiyah,” she said, and let’s just keep in mind that this is the woman who, every time I used to go home after a Fancy New York Fashion Cut from Norman, would say, “Your fringe is very long, do you want me to trim it?”—

“Aiyah,” she said, this afternoon, “your kind of hairstyle, you can just grab chunks of it and take the scissors and—” and here you could hear the gleam of the cut in her voice—“chiak!”

We danced; we danced and it was the new year, and there was Champagne, and Champagne, and dancing. “Tu peux m’inviter chez toi,” I said, so he did, and in the new year we walked hand-in-hand.

In the new year, phone calls were made all around town, and everyone decided to stay in bed. There was Nutella in bed, after all, and tea, and lemon yoghurt. Later, a nap later, two naps later, there were the fairy lights of rue Mouffetard, and Paris Paris Paris from the upstairs balcony. Slate roofs stretched left to right while a fine rain started to fall.



Still just a whisper into the new year, the sky was blue, and we were a good-looking group in black and red, Maud and me and Jeanne and Vio and Tom and Gregory, looking for a lunch by the Canal Saint-Martin.

Tom drove us around the city’s traffic jams, even through the Louvre a little, before we settled into Café Marly for fresh mint teas. We found a galette des rois in some boulangerie on the boulevard Saint-Germain, and—I don’t know how—managed to carry it home whole, the puff pastry and the almond and the sugared crust, without leaning in and taking a bite out of the crisp sweetness. Later, after the sun had set, up the curling staircase at Tom’s, a bed under a slanting skylight, while outside rue de la Huchette continued in non-stop lights and bustle.



The mornings and the afternoons and the nights seemed like one long beautiful day; we slept so little, and each moment melted one into the other. In that last hour before the train, Gab knew something was wrong, and Maud knew what it was. For someone who travels as much as I do, I sure haven’t gotten used to leaving.