Today, Paris has been my home for longer than England ever was – twenty years or so in the latter, thirty and more in the former. What do I miss that I can’t put in my suitcase and bring over with me? Only the jokes
The playwright Sacha Guitry once said that to be a Parisian “you don’t have to be born here. We are all reborn on arrival.” As an immigrant to the city of light two decades ago, I was stripped bare of my language, my English education and my culture, ready to become whoever I wanted.
Today, Paris has been my home for longer than England ever was – 20 years or so in the latter, 30 and more in the former. A childhood in Sterling and then an adult life – a job, a family, friends, a cat – in francs and euros. Paris is home, and home is cheese, fresh baguette, the rumble of the métro. It is having coffee standing up at the zinc reading l’Equipe.
Leave one country and move to another and your perspective on life changes. Just like if you go to the theatre and sit in the stalls, you get a great view of ankles and nostrils.
Sit in the dress circle and you get fewer feet, more face. Move up to the gods and it’s all bald pates and hairpieces. Hamlet is still Hamlet, from wherever you sit, but you get a different angle each time – each with its own merits and disadvantages.
When I first moved to France I had to give up my mother tongue. I was equipped with schoolgirl French but I discovered – oh joy! – that I could say whatever I wanted and it didn’t matter. I would no longer be judged depending on whether I chose to say loo, toilet or lavatory.
A foreign language is like Monopoly money – you can spend freely, extravagantly. You can be wasteful and not care. I can say tu and not vous and get away with it. They will shrug their shoulders and murmur “Ahh, elle est anglaise! She doesn’t know what she is saying.” Even when I know damn well what I am saying.
It was not only language that I lost: next to go were various absolute truths. I had been taught that the printing press was invented by William Caxton and the potato discovered by Walter Raleigh. But in France, credit for these is assigned to Gutenberg and Parmentier. I was quite sure that Jenner invented vaccination but here it is all Pasteur – there is no mention of anyone else.
When I visited the battlefields near Amiens I explained to the barman in the local café that my great-grandfather had fought near by. “But if he was British, what was he doing here?” he asked. For the French, the First World War was fought in Verdun – they know little of the Somme or Ypres, nothing of poppies and Picardy.
By moving to France, I daisy-forked myself out of a peaceful lawn. It wasn’t easy having my roots dangling in the air for all to see, but it made me who I am today.
I left London a student and began my adult life in Paris – living, loving, voting and paying my taxes over here, never in Britain.
I have worked long, difficult hours over weekends and nights without taking six-hours lunch breaks, despite the myths – but I have also basked in the endless hot summer holidays and innumerable and inexplicable jours fériés.
I have been chatted up, and wolf-whistled at and much more. I have been sacked from a job for refusing to sleep with someone. This is – or was, until recently – considered quite ordinary. I have met Jean-Paul Belmondo, smoked endless Gauloises and made love in a hotel room in the afternoon – but not all three at the same time.
Life here is less about money: wages are lower but social security is better. Taxes are higher but waiting lists are shorter.
Things are changing, but slowly, ever so slowly: the simple things in life are still important. Sitting in the sun drinking a glass of cool rosé. Looking aimlessly in a second-hand bookshop but not buying anything.
The best thing about living in Paris is walking slowly along the canal to our friendly cheese shop run by Sandrine and her husband. Ash covered Valençay pyramids, pillow-soft camemberts, wrinkly, pale apricot Langres are all lined up waiting to be chosen. Cheese is a serious matter and mustn’t be rushed: Sandrine asks me exactly what time I am planning on having dinner. If I want that Livarot, it may not be quite ready for tonight, better wait until tomorrow. The other customers wait patiently, listening and taking notes. Someone has their eye on a perfect Epoisses, but I get there first.
On the way home I nip into the boulangerie for a fresh baguette. House rules are that as I walk the final yards home, with a finger and thumb I am allowed to break off and eat the crusty, still-hot knobble. It beats buying Dairylea triangles and sliced bread in Tesco.
Of course, when I come back to London – the wonders of the Eurostar – it feels exciting, busy. It is bigger, blacker, wetter, but also more welcoming than dove-grey, grumpy Paris.
What do I miss that I can’t put in my suitcase and bring over with me? Only the jokes. The one thing that is definitely not a French speciality is being funny. Oh, they are happy enough to laugh if you tell them they can, but it doesn’t come naturally to them.
Perhaps it has something to do with all those subjunctives and preceding direct objects that you have to learn at school – they do slightly take the wind out of your sails. I often find myself finishing a phrase with “and that was a joke, by the way…” Or warning someone that “I will raise my hand when I get to the punchline.”
I am sometimes asked if I ever think about going back to Britain. (I have of course held on to some of my past. The Clangers, Marmite, cryptic crosswords.) But it wouldn’t be going back; it would be moving on. The country I left and the person I was then no longer exist. Woolworths has gone. Fifty pence pieces are tiny. The silver birch that grew in our front garden has been chopped down and there is now a tarmacked parking space where its branches once gently waved.
So, if I had to leave, where would I go? There would have to be decent weather, cheese and fresh bread. And some jokes. If I spin the globe on my desk I can’t see many places that fit the bill. Perhaps I could take up permanent residence on the Eurostar and just swish to and fro.
Camilla Barnes book, The Usual Desire To Kill, is out on 10 April (Scribner UK)