I need to make one thing clear straight away: I’m not complaining. What follows may sound like I’m whingeing and whining, furiously walking around in my little diamond brogues and telling everyone who’ll listen about how tight they are, but that’s not what I’m doing. All is well, I swear. It’s just – gosh, it’s tiring. My life is tiring. I’m exhausted, and I’m so broke.
I’m writing this from Paris, where I had to get to in short notice as my little brother turned 30 over the weekend. You may be thinking that surely, a birthday is by definition not something that would usually take you by surprise. I would certainly agree with you. Still, somehow, I only received the message a few weeks ago: there was to be a party, and naturally I had to attend. People don’t just turn 30 every day.
I looked at the Eurostar prices, came close to fainting, looked at them again, this time with only one eye open, to make them seem blurrier and maybe further away, and I booked my tickets. I then did the same thing with Airbnb. My present to my brother was: my very presence. A gift was, at this stage, out of the question.
In any case, much fun was had on Saturday evening, and I suppose I was lucky. Before Paris, he lived in Shanghai. Things could have been worse.
I also got to catch up with two of my French cousins, whom I love very much and don’t get to see as often as I’d wish. That isn’t really anyone’s fault: one of them spends a lot of time in Denmark, as he is an academic specialising in Scandinavian languages.
The third one wasn’t there but that was fine: we saw each other in New York, where he lives and I visit often, the last time only last month. Though I have two Moroccan cousins also living in the French capital, I won’t have time to see them this time; instead, our next catch-up will have to be on the other side of the Mediterranean.
There’s also a stray one in Bordeaux who I only ever see in Marrakech, but who lived in the north of England for a while. The last and youngest one, meanwhile, lives in Casablanca with his mother but the pair of them will come to spend Christmas in Nantes with us. It isn’t clear to me how we’ll do it but, allegedly, the four of us will be piling into my mother’s studio flat for a few days.
Suggested Reading
It’s time to get out of your cultural silo
In the meantime, I’ll be returning to Britain tomorrow and going straight from the train to a restaurant for the birthday of one of my oldest friends. We met each other in high school in France, then I moved to London and she was there for a little while, but ended up settling down in the US, selfishly, due to being half-American. Her work has sent her to London for a few weeks so at least we now get to spend time together.
After that… well, after that I’ll rest for a week or two, hopefully. Again, I really am not complaining: it is both lovely and amusing to me that I’ve ended up in this life full of relatives and friends from all around the world. Many of them have itchy feet too, meaning that you can’t even rely on them to stay put. My brother has already said he’d like to live abroad for a while, my mum wants to move back to Morocco when she retires, and, and, and…
What fascinates me about it is that clearly, we itinerant mongrels call to each other. I went to an entirely normal state high school, which was hardly home to heirs and millionaires, yet most of the friends I made ended up leaving Nantes as adults. Several of them ended up in Britain; one is in Dublin; one in New York; everyone else in Paris.
Classmates and vague acquaintances stayed close to home, but our people? We just ran away, the moment we could. Aside from one or two exceptions, none of us are in extravagantly highly paid jobs. We just wanted to see more of the world and we got to make it happen, is all.
I’m so glad that we all managed to take flight, and even happier that we’re all still in touch with each other. I talked about it with my grandmother a few months ago and she marvelled at all the far-flung places in which her grandchildren had managed to meet up over the years. To her generation, it just seemed absurd.
Still, it’s important to me (and to them, I hope!) that we do see each other often, or at least manage to catch each other between two airports, when we can, only if for a few hours. Our bonds may stretch across continents, but that doesn’t make them any less strong.
That’s what I wish those banging on about “anywheres” and “citizens of nowhere” would understand; lacking roots doesn’t mean lacking ties, and people will always matter more than places do.
