\n\t\t\t\t\tToday, 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\u2019t put in my suitcase and bring over with me? Only the jokes\t\t\t\t\t <\/p>\n
The playwright Sacha Guitry once said that to be a Parisian \u201cyou don\u2019t have to be born here. We are all reborn on arrival.\u201d 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. <\/p>\n
Today, Paris has been my home for longer than England<\/a> ever was \u2013 20 years or so in the latter, 30 and more in the former. A childhood in Sterling and then an adult life \u2013 a job, a family, friends, a cat \u2013 in francs and euros. Paris is home, and home is cheese, fresh baguette, the rumble of the m\u00e9tro. It is having coffee standing up at the zinc reading l\u2019Equipe.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Sit in the dress circle and you get fewer feet, more face. Move up to the gods and it\u2019s all bald pates and hairpieces. Hamlet is still Hamlet, from wherever you sit, but you get a different angle each time \u2013 each with its own merits and disadvantages.<\/p>\n When I first moved to France<\/a> I had to give up my mother tongue. I was equipped with schoolgirl French but I discovered \u2013 oh joy! \u2013 that I could say whatever I wanted and it didn\u2019t matter. I would no longer be judged depending on whether I chose to say loo, toilet or lavatory. <\/p>\n A foreign language is like Monopoly money \u2013 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 \u201cAhh, elle est anglaise! She doesn\u2019t know what she is saying.\u201d Even when I know damn well what I am saying. <\/p>\n 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 \u2013 there is no mention of anyone else. <\/p>\n When I visited the battlefields near Amiens I explained to the barman in the local caf\u00e9 that my great-grandfather had fought near by. \u201cBut if he was British, what was he doing here?\u201d he asked. For the French, the First World War was fought in Verdun \u2013 they know little of the Somme or Ypres, nothing of poppies and Picardy.<\/p>\n By moving to France<\/a>, I daisy-forked myself out of a peaceful lawn. It wasn\u2019t easy having my roots dangling in the air for all to see, but it made me who I am today. <\/p>\n I left London a student and began my adult life in Paris<\/a> \u2013 living, loving, voting and paying my taxes over here, never in Britain. <\/p>\n I have worked long, difficult hours over weekends and nights without taking six-hours lunch breaks, despite the myths \u2013 but I have also basked in the endless hot summer holidays and innumerable and inexplicable jours f\u00e9ri\u00e9s. <\/p>\n 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 \u2013 or was, until recently \u2013 considered quite ordinary. I have met Jean-Paul Belmondo, smoked endless Gauloises and made love in a hotel room in the afternoon \u2013 but not all three at the same time. <\/p>\n