french doubt

october, whoa

Picture me in a purple paisley silk shirt, standing on a corner in Montmartre with a camera around my neck, a sketchbook under one arm, eating a pistachio éclair.

It’s an overcast day in Paris and I have my head in the clouds just five feet off the ground

I also have a lot of dopey animals keeping me dumb company while we watch trash reality tv together in far off places.

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Hey, it’s been a while. This is my eighth month of being away. Since May I have shaved my head, dyed it, grown it out a bit, cut it over a bathroom sink, and lamented that there’s no small-batch bleach packs for buzz cuts at Boots.

Overall I’ve been undeniably lazy and am undeniably relaxed about it, so here some lists.

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Things about the past you can ask me more about:

• Getting bumped from my flight to Romania and having a free night in an expensive hotel before a cross-country road trip with two Romanian strangers

• Meeting one of British aristocracy’s most eccentric women in a very cheap London hostel during the week of the Ascot races (important info for the story)

• Reading my first ever Jane Austen novel while travelling through Bath (just pure literary joy here)

• A weird life-drawing experience, strange like the feeling of saying “pferd” or “jetzt” for the first time as a non-German speaker, but I guess not unpleasant, just weird.

• How good can a comedy musical about WWII spies be? And how can it change the real world?

• How good was Boy Genius and MUNA??

• How does it feel to be mildly electrocuted?

• How do you fill your time on all those long trains?

Things about the future you can ask me more about:

• Coming home to Melbourne

• Anything else; I’ve become very wise in my travels.

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Where I’ve been in the last few months:

• Berlin, Germany

• Prague, Czechia

• Vienna, Austria

• Budapest, Hungary

• Cluj, Romania

• Sibiu, Romania

• London, UK

• Brighton, UK

• Paris, France

• Bath, UK

• Stratford-upon-Avon, UK

• Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK

• Liverpool, UK

• Edinburgh, UK

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My manifesto for long-term solo traveling

• Being alone means no one can drag down your mood – unbridle your joy!

• You are your own master – walk slowly, sit down as often as you want, leave the museum when you’re done.

• Every city has ice cream and there is no wrong time to eat it.

• Having a non-essentials budget for things like nice soap is essential. And be nice to the shop person because they have control over how many samples they give you, and samples are great.

• Lonely is not wishing someone was with you, lonely is deleting a message before sending it.

• When in doubt, make French toast and do your French toast dance.

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At the end of June, I wrote myself a note on the half-title page of a cloth-bound copy of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own that I got for 50p at an Oxfam bookshop in Brighton. I first came to this book shamefully late in my literary journey, but it perfectly timed with a large shift in my life. When I moved to Melbourne in 2018, I “borrowed” my sister’s penguin classic copy off a bookshelf in our childhood home and started reading it on the flight to my new grown-up home. It’s not my favourite book, it’s not even my favourite Woolf (shout-out to Orlando), but every time I see a copy at a second-hand bookshop I am reminded of the things I love about myself, and my day gets better.

I’m a bit behind where I’d like to be with reading this year, but in the last few months I’ve read some brilliant things.

• Violeta – Isabel Allende

• Orlando (again) – Virginia Woolf. When I re-read this, I buy a second-hand copy that I re-donate when I'm done with a little note to its next owner. It’s my favourite book of all time (so far).

• Days at the Morisaki Bookshop – Satoshi Yagisawa. I gave it 3 stars on StoryGraph, but honestly if it was just the second-half, I probably would have given it more. Worth the push-through, even though I had to really really convince myself to stick with it.

• Persuasion – Jane Austen.

• Sexing the Cherry – Jeanette Winterson.

• The Door – Magda Szabó (Hungarian). One of the best things I’ve done this year is seek out prominent writers from the different countries I’ve been to. I would have never come across this book otherwise and I’m so so glad I did.

• Transfigured Night – Libuše Moníková (Czech).

• Bad Art Mother – Edwina Preston.

• The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion.

I am currently reading The Orphic Voice by Elizabeth Sewell and looking for my next non-fiction. Recommendations are welcome.