deconstructing mark
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Sunday 29.5.04 | INDEED, yes, I am back. I have had a very refreshing week, spent at a fabulous villa in South West France, a little north of Biarritz, with eight of my closest friends, all of whom I have studied French and/or German with over the last three-and-a-half years. There was, of course, an element of melancholia about the whole thing, because something is now coming to an end, but I suppose that means that something different is starting. Every exit is an entrance somewhere else. Got back to London yesterday afternoon and, having unpacked and generally faffed about for a few hours getting my life back to normal, I did what I love most: I hopped on a bus down to the river to go and have a long walk. As soon as I was on the bus (top deck, at the front - where else?) it all flooded back into my blood: the babel-babble, the London traffic along the Bayswater Road which could have just as well have been a rickshaw-bottleneck in Xanadu and the rather odd-smelling man who plonked himself next to me to marvel at it all too soon reminded me where my home was. As soon as I got down to the London Eye I started gulping lungfuls of solitude and the acrid London air - I had only been away for a week, and not missed it that much but it was still as sublime as every time I have come back to it - and realised over and over again that I am still in Love with London. I probably should write more about my week in the villa, if not for the sheer comedy then just posterity, but I don't think I'm in the mood now. It involved the usual cauldron of wine, bad language and general malarkey which seems to follow my group of friends round like an invincible, terrible smell, and was really very enjoyable. Being in France again was not as, well, rebarbative to me as I had thought it might have been (regular readers of this site will know that I am not a large France fan, for a whole multitude of reasons) - in fact, it was really rather pleasant in many ways; one of the main ones being that I wasn't in Nice. But that's all for now. More soon from Yorkshire, where I am headed tomorrow. | ||
