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I will. My leaving like this is quite unusual for me. I’ve wanted to do something a bit peppy like this for ages and never bothered. What atime to choose to start! What a way to start my French adventure! This should be a long epistle clarifying everything but you know me (better than myself, you know me) and how I couldn’t clarify a steamed up window. I think I’ve said all I can. I don’t know if the affair is on or off. I think I’ll just put it on hold for a few months. When I ring again I think I’d prefer to get an engaged tone rather than ‘number disconnected ’.
    From the boy you were/are/will be fond of – Thanks for everything ,
    Graham (who lives as far away from Poland as Passion is from Graham)
    – Count the number of ‘I thinks ’
    – Lots of exclamation marks
    – This letter will infuriate you I know
    – Say thank you to Alex. He’s really a gem. Give him a kiss for me. He’d really be quite fanciable if it wasn’t for those dreadful trousers he wears .
    – Say thanks to Pierre and Christine aussi. They’re both adorable .
    – And now the experience starts. Do you think a tourist office will tell me where the gay quarter is?
    Nothing to add or subtract, though I could easily divide or multiply .
    Graham .
    Writing this letter out for the third time in my life I can sort of forgive myself a little. I was only nineteen, and it was three in the morning.
    But where could I leave it to be sure Esther and Alex would find it? Only one place sprang to mind – the toilet bowl. I genuinely didn’t think they would read any extra subliminal message into the location. Sweet boy. It really was just the one place where I was certain they would find it. I shut the door and headed off into the silent wet streets of Paris.
    If this were a film, this is the point when I would get myself into all sorts of adventures with drug dealers and prostitutes, perhaps hook up with a travelling circus, but all I really remember was doing a lot of walking. I found a youth hostel and left my bag there. While having imaginary angry conversations in my head with Esther, I tramped the streets wondering what I should do. Obviously I needed a job. I wandered into shop after shop and wandered out again, unable to pluck up the courage to ask for one. I walked past the Pompidou and it struck me that I could busk. Odd, when I think back, that I never thought further as to what sort of busking I would do. I bought a long bolt of some material, and that was about as far as that plan got.
    One evening around dusk a couple of days later, I was walking along the banks of the Seine when I suddenly looked up. There, high on a balcony over the far bank, were Esther, Alex, Pierre and Christine having a drink. I couldn’t make out their faces clearly but I liked to imagine that they were having a good old laugh at my expense. The music swells, the camera pulls out to show Graham as a tiny dot in the vast teeming city of Paris. Cut to:
    A bus heading from Paris to London. A friend called Julie from university was spending the summer there and I’d worked out that whatever chance I’d have of getting ajob, it would be marginally higher in a country where I could speak the language.
    I’ve now lived in London for nearly twenty years. It is still my number one favourite city in the world, so I’m slightly surprised at how disappointed I was by it that first time. After the scale and grandeur of Paris, there was something very domestic about London. All the legendary landmarks, Westminster Abbey, Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, they were all so . . . well, so small. Dublin had places that looked this good.
    I tracked down my friend. She was living in a squat in West Norwood. If you haven’t been to West Norwood, and I can think of no good reason why you would have been, it is one of those seemingly endless bits of south London with semi-detached houses and rows of shops like Radio Rentals and Clintons cards, and if you’re really