Lately I've been missing Trinidad and, of course, Tobago. The pangs are growing stronger but there is no immediate end in sight to quell my longing. As things stand I will return to sweet T&T in 2017.
When a copy of Caribbean Beat arrived in the post last week, I thumbed through it and had an out-of-body experience. It felt like I was reading it on-board that 20-minute flight across the water for a long, idle weekend in that Tobago paradise, instead of lying on my bed in North London.
Rainy season has hit Trinidad I hear. It's hit England too, except we call it something else: summer!
I shouldn't complain, really, we've had a few hot days in this English summer. About five, by my count.
Last weekend, camping in a rural idyllic county called Sussex, we experienced almost the entire spectrum of British weather in three days.
We camped in the rolling contours of a farmer's field next to a village called West Hoathly with all the hallmarks of quintessential England–thatch-roofed cottages, cricket on the village green, a 16th century pub called The Cat Inn, livery stables, horses clip-clopping down winding lanes, country houses hosting pheasant shoots and a lawn bowls club... We had to explain lawn bowls to the Trini among us–unhelpfully my Colombian brother-in-law described it as "like petanque, French bowls..." it's not! It's far more civilised.
We arrived to boiling hot sun and I immediately stripped to just Speedos, as is traditional. By the time we'd put up the tents, a wind had built up which threatened to blow down the less sturdy ones.
That night an electric storm with sheet lightning and thunder claps rumbled through the night (always exciting in a tent.)
The next day was glorious sunshine so we played cricket using tent poles for wickets, a dining fork for the bails, the forest edge as the boundary and a tennis ball as, well, the ball.
Our very amateur cricketing contingent included players from Yorkshire, the West Indies and Middlesex. I can't remember the final totals, but I absolutely definitely won.
At one point I was dismissively knocking the bowlers about to rounds of applause that rippled around the campsite. Oh how my mother lived to regret that dropped catch off the second ball of my innings.
At 6 o'clock the following morning the rain began pattering on the canvas. By 7 am it was heavy. By eight it was torrential. Water began dripping into our tent. I unzipped the front flap and saw my brother's tent had collapsed with him and his two children inside.
"Was water falling on your head?" his eldest later asked me.
"Yes," I replied.
"Me too," he said. Partially sucking his thumb.
"This is why camping is fun," I lied. And he sloped off to eat his bacon and eggs inside a drier tent.
The English weather is part of the reason why I left this beautiful green isle in the first place.
In six weeks I am leaving again, decamping to Paris this time, for a year, where the other half will further her political science studies and I, like some kind of modern-day bohemian, will write stories in my room, wander the Boulevard Saint-Germain, cycle by the banks of the Seine and try not to die in the bath like Jim Morrison.
"No, I do not speak French," is a statement I have begun uttering with such frequency that I'm now learning to say it before the question even arrives–which it inevitably does. I will have to practise saying it in actual French.
But I know Paris reasonably well and the Parisians seem to like me–they even speak English to me!
The news from Paris this weekend was of an armed robbery siege by three gunmen in a Primark store in one of the northern banlieues (the rough suburbs that lie beyond the peripherique ring road that surrounds Paris.)
Just two days earlier in Wood Green, north London, where half of my family live and two miles from where I live, two men carried out a drive-by machine-gun attack in broad daylight, killing the owner of a Turkish bakery.
It's not just Trinidad that's dangerous, you know!
Paris has its rough edges, just as London does, but the beauty, history, culture and (clich� alert) romance of Paris is unrivalled by any city.
For the purposes of absorbing every last drop, we have found a studio apartment in the Quartier Latin (the Latin Quarter, the 5th arrondissement. The previous tenant (a French connection of mine whose sister I once rescued from an awkward prolonged attempt at seduction by a lecherous receptionist in the foyer of a hotel in Syria) is bound for Luxembourg. Her boyfriend, more exotically, is off to the Ivory Coast. We will keep the place warm for them through the Parisian autumn and winter...
The stage is set, the formalities are all but dealt with. I will, of course, be back and forth to London on a regular basis. And, as such, I'm thinking of changing the name of this column–temporarily at least–to Down and Out In Paris and London.
Qu'est-ce que tu en penses? Oui? Non? Peut-�tre? Any feedback welcome. Salut!