Bisous Baby

I honestly have no idea how this can be true, but this will be the last instalment of the column that I write whilst here in France. My work contract ends on April 30th and my flight is booked for the same day. The only problem is I’m not sure I want to leave.

In the last seven months I’ve partied on a boat on the Seine, I trekked across the sand at St Malo to visit Chateaubriand’s grave, I was terrified by a woodpigeon in Dinan and got ridiculously excited by the world’s longest tapestry in the castle at Angers. I’ve hung out at a mammoth exhibition in Rennes and I’ve hung out in a tattoo shop in Nantes. A gay French man taught me how to knit mittens. I’ve been given several free buckets of cider by sympathetic bar men after Wales lost rugby matches. I learnt how to teach and received a letter from the Recteur de Nantes saying how impressed he was with my work. I really helped some kids to be confident when speaking English. I broke my phone after dropping it in the fountain at Place Royale at 4am on a Thursday morning. I paddled in the sea at La Baule in February and got sunburnt in March. I’ve had a barman ask me and a friend, “Do you want the same thing you had last time you were here: two shots of tequila and a pint with two straws?” And an awful lot more that doesn’t need to be published and circulated amongst everyone I know.

This afternoon is the famous Nantes carnival so I’ll be heading into town with friends to check that out a little later. Tomorrow I should be taking a flight to Geneva for a few nights, providing this volcano behaves itself. The plan is to climb Mount Salève, picnic by the lake and go drinking with a friend of an American guy I met here, who is studying in Switzerland. Then when I get back I’ll have six days until my flight home.

These last couple of months I’ve had such an incredible time, but it seems as soon as you settle into something it all changes again. I’m sure everyone else on their year abroad will be feeling the same way. We’d known that we were going to have to take on this huge challenge for several years and now it’s over, just like that. Turning twenty-one within twelve hours of getting back to the UK is definitely going to hit home the fact that I’m getting pretty old. Time seems to go faster the older you get.

Sadly this isn’t having the results that my mother would hope it would; instead of realising that I don’t have much time left before I have to get a real job, I just keep thinking about all the places I want to go and all the things I want to see. Doing a brainless job in the UK does seem a little dull, but doing it somewhere else in the world is another matter. I’ve met so many people here in their late 20s or even 30s who just never stopped travelling about and going wherever their impulses took them. In fact, ‘International fuck-up’ seems to be a rather well-respected qualification. For now I think it’s best that I go back to Warwick next year and finish my degree, content myself with a couple of festivals and trips to Italy and Amsterdam this summer, but after I graduate, who knows where I’ll go next?