goodbye June (and some French pictures)

This little blog has been rather quiet. My head’s been a bit up in the clouds recently. A lot of headspace taken up with wondering and worrying and PhD things. My plan is to root July back in the ordinary details of the here and now, though. Notice this moment. Be in this moment. Here and now. 

I think I'm going to try out something similar to Emily Diana Ruth’s video series ‘Letters to July’ on here next month. Every day in July, for the past two years, she’s made a small (quite lovely) video on something she’s been noticing or thinking about, and I think setting myself a similar project might be a good way to shake myself awake. I won’t make films, but I thought I’d (try to) post something on here most days in July: small things on the ‘something I’ve noticed' theme. Some days a picture or a thought. Other days a sentence from a book I'm reading or a poem (another July goal is to read a poem every morning). It’s going to be a busy month novel-writing-wise. But! I’ll see how I get on.

In the meantime – here are a few pictures from my trip to Chartres (and Paris) earlier in the year. I was there visiting my friend who was in the middle of her year abroad at the time and acted as a lovely host for a few days, allowing me to live out my long-held dream of living in a French attic (...even though, the attic in 'the dream' is actually in Paris where I'd spend my days writing beautiful things by typewriter while being madly in love with... wait? Hang on. I think I might've plagiarised this dream from Moulin Rouge. Anyway...)

I’d planned to write screeds while I was there – about the dusty light and the shuttered windows and the smell of baguettes still hanging in the air late at night, the way the cathedral in Chartres peeks out from little cracks in the buildings and how everyone in France seems to wear black making me, in my red spotty coat, stand out like a sore thumb – but something about airplanes seems to knock the words right out of my head. (The same happened when I went to America last October. I brought notebooks to write in and novels to read, but couldn’t seem to concentrate long enough to focus on the shape of the letters.) So, aside from postcards - which I happily scribbled while sitting in various cafés trying to pass for a French person - I hardly wrote a word while I was there and consequently lost a lot of the detail. In the absence of words, I did take quite a lot of pictures though, so here they are. I'll capture it in words another time...

♥ 

Fiona caught this last picture of me reading a Paris map before my train left homewards. Probably one of my favourite pictures. It was a lovely trip, and has made me kind of determined to learn more of the language. Conversation is rather limited when all you know how to say is 'Where's the toilet?', 'I would like one croissant, please' and 'the elephant eats the orange'.

('L'éléphant mange une orange' - in case you were wondering. Cheers, Duolingo.)