Well it’s been a while hasn’t it?

The news is that I’m still here! I miss you all though. In an ideal world I would have come back for a bit during the summer. In the real world I’ve just been too broke to contemplate airfares and Eurostar. And besides, the summer here was much better!

So, what to report? I have moved up two socio-economic brackets from “sandwichier” to “professeur”. For the last six months I’ve been teaching English to office workers. The language school is in a gleaming glass and steel building at La Défense, one of my favourite places in Paris. Sometimes I have my lunchtime sandwich on the steps of the famous white Arche, where one can gaze down at the Arc de Triomphe and reflect on the French obsession with symmetry or symbolism or something. The job itself is probably a bit more rewarding than making sandwiches. I’ve gradually been getting more professional and generally better (present perfect continuous; regular and irregular comparatives). The students are almost all friendly and enthusiastic, which definitely helps when really they are just paying for two hours of American cultural imperialism. (There was even an ad in the metro recently for a language school which said, “No English? No job.”) To alleviate the awkwardness of this situation I’ve now acquired a sense of cultural superiority appropriate to my position. It’s useful to believe in your mission. The lessons themselves are fairly easy money: at worst a slog over grammar, at best a laid-back “fluency exercise with error correction” (a chat).

Socially, things tick along bit by bit. For the last three or four months I’ve been on an “Anglo-Saxon social fast”, that’s to say, no more English-speaking chums outside work. Otherwise it is too easy. Financially it will never be easy. Not because Paris is expensive (it’s not) but because as a teacher there is just no income security. We are paid by the hour; the students go on holiday all summer; go figure. I have never counted pennies so fastidiously.

I have also never had such a cheap summer holiday. It cost €121.42, or something in that region, including the bottle of sun cream. Transport was free: it was a cycling holiday! I cycled with a French guy to Mont Saint Michel. You know, the big castle on a rock in Brittany (or is it Normandy?). Anyway it was 540 kilometres away and we got there in five days. Impressive eh? We stopped in Rouen, where I finally fulfilled a long-held whimsy and saw the not-very-famous statue of Rollo the Viking. Mont Saint Michel itself was reminiscent of Edinburgh castle, with its hordes of tourists on a tireless quest for a nice souvenir keyring and some overpriced snackfood. Still, it’s always good to feel morally superior, and after cycling 500km I believe you have the right to.

Last month I finally moved out of the loft studio in St Germain (which incidentally was far less classy than it sounds) and I am now sharing a flat with a nice Estonian lady and two slightly-less-nice cats. It’s near Montmartre so there are no Aston Martins with Swiss numberplates parked outside, and the neighbours seem to be mostly standing on the street corner doing deals. This arrangement is definitely more appropriate to my resources.

The French are funny people. You might remember that last time I regaled you with lots of theories to this effect. Well, I spent a while trying to think up more, until it struck me that you can find everything you need to know in the Métro. Graffiti, for example. Everyone’s at it. A couple of weeks ago a crack team of anti-ad militants defaced every single advert the entire length of a metro line. With, for example, “Turn off the telly and turn on your life”, on an advert for a flatscreen TV. Inspirational. There is also the (official) decor. Concorde station is tiled with the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, one letter per tile. St Germain des Prés is reserved for wall projections of brow-furrowing philosophy quotations. Then there are the buskers, who are known as “musicians” because there is no word in French for busker. Everyone gives them money even if they are spectacularly rubbish, such as the guy on my train yesterday who was in such a hurry to reap his harvest of 50 cent coins that his accordion ditty sounded uncannily like a CD skipping. There’s one “busker” who specialises in poetry recitals. All the passengers assume she’s an escaped mental patient until she finishes up and asks for money. And then they pay.

There is bound to be a moral to this story somewhere.

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