I'm dusting off keyboards, rifling through page after page of crap looking for passwords, and metaphorically clearing my digital throat: I might well be back. I hope so.
Reading down the last few posts, I note that, with quite astonishing optimism, I believed I was upping sticks and becoming a Frenchie waaaaay back in 2008. I also apparently thought I had got my paperwork sorted and would be on strike with the best of them by now. Hollow laughs all round, please!
I'm still here, waffle rather than baguette, endive not onion. But! I have taken the definitive actual I'm-off steps, and will have nowhere to live in Brussels as of December. Possibly no work, either, but today's about focusing on the positive. The rule is, pessimism tomorrow, and pessimism yesterday - but never pessimism today.

Anaïs Nin was, by all accounts, quite a goer. No better than she should be, as the mother of an old boyfriend would mutter, cryptically (not of me, I hasten to add. I don't think), but also a fascinating mind to be discovered in 60 years worth of diaries. Born in France, with Cuban-Danish-Catalan heritage, she mingled with the inter-war Parisian intellectual and artistic elite, the friend, and occasional close ladyfriend, of Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Otto Rank and Gore Vidal, among others. Given the contents of her diaries, it seems astonishing that she would write that upon hearing her friends tell of their soirees, walks and projects, she "always listened with a kind of jealousy and envy, as if [she] had never known, or would ever know such nights". She goes on to realise that she has indeed had many such nights, and they were all contained within the pages of her diary, but that it was the dramatization her friends gave to their stories that meant "I felt nothing could parallel them, even whilst I was experiencing similar moments in my own life"
Sometimes all I have to say to people is "Well, I work in Brussels at the moment, but I spend my weekends in Paris and come the New Year I'll be - " and they're off "Oh, but I can see you now, the walks by the Seine, the eclairs, the sophisticated parties, oh but look at you, so ELEGANT..." and I'm thinking, well, no, it's me, remember? I still like a cheese and pickle sandwich, my tights are laddered, and come the summer I'm not ashamed to admit that there's nothing I like more than an icy white wine spritzer. They won't be making me an honorary Parisian any time soon, even if I do manage to file the 47 duplicate copies of my last six-months' earnings in time.

But maybe Anaïs had a point:
"
It was this that made me so restless, this disparity between the imagined and the actual. But now I see that the extraordinary was in my own vision..."
Maybe I do live this extraordinary life. Maybe I need to sit down and tell myself all about the weekend I just had, the party, the croissants in bed, the Sunday evening aperitif sitting on the banks of the canal, and maybe then the restlessness and the sideways glances at other people's lives can stop.
I imagine my life in Paris is a little more sedate than Anaïs Nin's, what with the erotica being cut down to a minimum, but maybe it's time to learn to tell it like Henry Miller. And to rock a mantilla like Anaïs.