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Thank you all so very much.
For the hugs and the endless cups of tea. For letting me stay in your houses, and mopping up the tears. For listening, for sharing, for bitching, for understanding. For going to lunch, having takeaways and making dinner. For taking me to the Irish-Jewish Museum, to Tropic Thunder, to Eddie Rockets, and to Navan. For always being there for the phone-calls, the middle-of-the-night-texts, the skypes and smoking area chats. For never getting frustrated and for never telling me to shut up. And for never letting me fall down.
There are no words in the world for how great you have all been. Thank you.
A few years ago, after studying French in college for a year, I realised that my once firm grasp on the language was slowly crumbling before my eyes. I decided that a French exchange would be my best course of action to return to my previously glittering standard in la belle langue. Because it had totally worked for one of my mates.
But oh, the luck of the draw. Whereas my chum spent three weeks in a villa near Lyon with a charming young woman who drank, smoked and flirted brazenly with Gallic charm and ease, my own canditate, a college friend of same, was a highly strung cat lover who lived in a one bedroomed apartment in St Etienne. The list of things which she found dègeulasse was inexhaustable, but very definite entries were: girls drinking pints, paying more than €3 for a meal, Hollyoaks, alcohol, and hugging. This tyrant in Diesel jeans displayed, with an almost nationalistic fervour, all of the worst clichès which one can associate with French women: arrogance, a penchant for Spanish guitar pop, hypochondria, disquieting racism towards Arabs and an impressive line in complaining without stopping. At all. Not that she wasn’t entertaining. In particular, the argument with her anorexic mother, which ended in the two of us fleeing down the stairwell, with the mother’s screams of “stupid fucking bitch” (approximate English translation) ringing in our ears, really was one for the memoirs. It was a tiring and bizarre six weeks that I spent in her company. I feel so bad about the three of them that she was inflicted upon my friends and family, that I speak of them rarely.
However, today I find myself back in France, Paris this time, house-sitting for the next three weeks. Having been here for under a week now, I have realised something concerning that shrill exchange student. Not only did the six weeks we spent together have no effect whatsoever on rebuilding my, by now decimated, French, but she has also instilled in me a tremendous fear of Frenchwomen. Given that I haven’t been able to get my legs waxed since leaving Dublin over three weeks ago, I feel looks of disapproval and reproach whenever I leave the house. Even when there’s no one on the street. They know something dègeulasse is going on. They know that below the dresses and tights and leggings, I really look like this -
And that I probably drink pints of beer.
