Time to scarper!

It’s reached the point where strangers have begun yelling my name when I’m out so I think that it is sufficient to say that my work here is done and it is time for me to leave. Obviously I am screaming with excitement about no longer having to boil water on the stove for a cup of tea or burning bread in the frying pan for toast, but there are admittedly a number of things I’ll miss about the place that has held me hostage for 9 months (I didn’t have a secret expat baby in the end).

These include items such as the prevalence of independent business and family-run enterprise (Starbucks is banned and the only McDonalds is located in the wilderness next to the motorway). This goes along with the bloody conceited yet so irresistibly quaint marchés that make me cavort around with a non-existent wicker basket buying organic goat’s cheese and lavender flavoured nougat. What is more, everyday gallantry is still very much alive, a stunt pulled off with such delicate proficiency that even Germaine Greer would melt – in fact, arguably some of the nicest citizens I have met have been bouncers, a far cry from the pits of Reading or Southampton. Seeing Spielberg and Del Toro at Cannes was also not too shabby.

But I have to say what I’ll miss most of all is not giving a flying shit about anything and living existentially just because it’s southern France. It does that to you. This is going to be detrimental to my readjustment to ordinary British life where urgency is actually a concept, when a lot of the time it needn’t be. And my god the croissants.

Actually wait what I’ll REALLY miss mostly is all the genial people I met that made life as a foreigner just that much more bearable; I kiffe them very much.

So that marks the end of this blog. I’d like to thank and apologise to my readership (although you chose to read, I retract my apology) and in the words of Felix Bumgardner, “I’m going home now. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.”