Fleeing London

---

It all started on a single idea. I turned to my boyfriend (Jonny) and said: I think I wanna go to Paris. and within the week I had found the course (Intensive course including phonetics at La Sorbonne) and was planning my budget. When I say planning the budget, I mean loosely tossing some numbers around, while Jonny tactfully pointed out that, er, that was all well and good but, er, you have no money. I have no time for these sort of details. My job as a waitress is terrible. Mostly it's my complete aversion to the following:
a) being patronised
b)making small talk
c)making small talk with people who are patronising me.

and also fourteen hour days.

Amelie, I ain't. But I rallied through, and saved and paid for my tuition and managed to move with Jonny to Islington, London, and I was soon packing up my things for Paris. This was done in a very detached sort of way, as though I knew I was going but didn't quite believe it. Traveling alone (which everyone must do at least a hundred times in their life) requires this sort of mentality to prevent oneself from diving under the proverbial covers and sobbing that one won't go, not by any means.

Every other time that I have been to Paris (more than a handful, less than a dozen), I have been alone or with my lovely mother. In fact, many a time it has been my mother who has packed me off to the city, sick of my moping about the house bewailing my latest heart-break. My mother has no sentimentality about these things. She has been know to strap me to a plane and wish me luck without so much as a flutter of maternal regret. Anyway, it has always done me a world of good, but this time.... this time I was leaving my boyfriend behind and the home we had made together. Furnishing our flat was traumatizing enough and to this day we are predisposed to spit when the word Ikea is mentioned. But I am Miss Independent Woman, and nothing will stop me. Not that he has any interest in stopping me, mind you. A cheery cheerio is all I expect from him, because he is Mr Secure.

I have two wheelie suitcases, one big and one small and I am negotiating a revolutionary balance/pulley system to attempt to move both at once, when Jonny turns up (Surprise!) from work, all suited and chivalrous and, although I am Miss Independent Woman, I am glad of his help.

To new King's Cross International station for the Eurostar has a sense of weightless and indeterminate space. We stop for a glass of champagne at 'the world's largest champagne bar', which in actual fact is dwarfed by the sheer size of the station, tiny under the huge glass dome. It will take all of two hours and a quarter to get to Paris, which is approximately how long it takes me to go two stops on the Circle line on the Underground in London.

In fact, having done the majority of my traveling from either Heathrow and/or 'standby' (there are better men than me wobbling on a ledge somewhere at the prospect of either), the complete lack of complication in the process is staggering... electronic tickets, a quick pat down at security, passport security who are perhaps more interested in the women than national security warrants. Overly, you couldn't ask for a more pleasant journey. Even the babies gurgle happily.

But it is dawning on me that I am alone and a text (my darling!) goes unread as I become increasingly vulnerable to the tears which stubbornly well under my eyes.

And within half a novel, and two magazines, I am in Paris. And strangely I feel a huge rush of relief. Hello Paris, I think... and breathe a deep sigh of relief.

---