Liz Gilbert does not believe in making excuses for her choices in life. There’s more than a tad of Screw You Dolores in that, if you ask me. So she probably won’t be buying this book, but if you see her do please give her a copy, and tell her from me that it was lovely to talk with her.
And Rachael, my littlest sister, if you are reading this, you are not to blame for me not having babies. But next time you hold your breath until you go blue, I am going to quietly set you down on a flat surface and tiptoe out of the room.
And since we’re having this intimate moment, yes, it was me who borrowed your pencil skirt and pushed it out of shape at the front and at the back and possibly a bit around the sides. It would really be better if you bought your clothes a size bigger from now on. Or two.
1. Rachael (sister)
2. Angus and Hugo (nephews)
3. Tom, Georgie and Florence (godchildren)
4. Bella, Lusia and the brand spanking new Sophia (great-nieces)
5. The little Chinese one with the pink bow at the airport the other day
Letter from PARIS, PART THREE
After two months in Paris, it is time to bid this beautiful city adieu.
Actually, the city might be beautiful, but Holy Vache the weather has been diabolique.
Until this morning, my last, when I woke up to the most glorious clear blue dawn. My little Montmartre apartment was all packed up and ready to vacate, but first I thought I would make the most of the blissfully empty streets of Paris for one last run.
Yes, a run.
You may have heard a rumour that I am some sort of super-athlete. Or perhaps you have even seen the pictures. But it’s not true. I do occasionally go running, but I am not a natural. Everything jiggles. Even bits that you wouldn’t have thought had it in them. My wrists jiggle. My ankles. My eyelashes. Everything.
That’s the bad thing about being 50 — the insistence on parts of your body to pucker and spoil. I never had cellulite until I was 49, but now I am dimpled in many places other than my cheeks, which a holy Roman Catholic bishop once told me was where the angels had touched me when I was a baby. And no, there was no other touching, but if the angels’ fingers truly cause dimples, then they have spent way too much time near my butt.
At home I would no more go running than fly to the moon (although at least gravity is kind there), but when I’m off on my travels and feel my calorie intake is outweighing my out-take, there’s nothing else for it. And in Paris, there is something wrong with you if your calorie intake is not outweighing your out-take.
The problem with running when I’m in foreign parts is that I have no sense of direction, which is troubling given that once 40 minutes has passed my legs stop working. In places like London or New York, I solve this problem by not worrying about where I end up and catching a cab home after the 40 minutes is up. But in Paris, I have been able to figure out a route that requires turning only two corners to deliver me back to where I started, having taken in a handful of the city’s most famous monuments. It is about the best reason to exercise I could ever conjure up, and this morning I did it for the last time.
Shortly after six I left the little alleyway at the foot of Montmartre where my apartment is, and headed down Rue des Martyrs as the shop owners started sweeping the pavement in front of their stores.
At the bottom I herbed around the little Notre Dame de Lorette church, then continued down narrow Rue Laffitte, trying not to trip up as I passed the fire station just before Boulevard des Italiens, where I remembered to look right for an uninterrupted view of the Paris opera house gleaming in all her glory at the end.
I then thundered down Rue Saint Anne, crossed over Rue de Rivoli, and there I was at the Louvre. This has never failed to impress me. How could it do anything else? At the Louvre I turned right into the Tuileries Gardens, whereupon in the distance I could see the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe.
Sometimes, I could see the firemen whom I had tried not to trip over in front of at the station doing their morning exercises down one side of the gardens, too. Or, better still, their morning stretches. However, this generally happens about 8.43, so today I missed them.
On I trotted, regardless, around the fountains and through the trees of the Tuileries Gardens until I hit the Luxor Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde. Here, I turned right, and again I could see, in the distance, the bulbous dome of Sacré Cœur, which I knew was just up behind my apartment. Two turns, that’s all I had to take.
At this point, as usual, I whipped out my Vélib’ card from my secret pocket and grabbed a city bicycle from the stand on the corner. But instead of cycling in a straight line back up towards the church as I usually did, I took the long way home, cycling down beside the river, crossing the bridge over the Seine to the Île de la Cité and Notre Dame, then swinging left down the riverbank and crossing back over another little bridge to the Île Saint-Louis at the back of the church. It was still not yet seven, the streets were quiet, there was only me and the odd street sweeper.
On the Pont de l’Archevêché behind the lovely Square Jean XXIII at the rear of Notre Dame, I pulled up to the kerb. The bridge railings on this little crossing were positively heaving with padlocks, each one engraved with a date and the names of the lovers who’d flocked here to pledge their love, attach their lock, and throw their key into the river, where it would stay forever. You don’t get more romantic than that, I thought, a tear welling in my eye. Such hope! Such faith!
Then a pigeon swooped down in front of me and nibbled on what I thought was a pile of vomit, but which turned out on close scrutiny to be a squashed pizza. And you don’t get less romantic than that, I thought.
But ain’t that life — and ain’t life grand?
I wondered, then, what would happen if the world’s biggest romantic and the world’s biggest cynic met on this bridge and argued about love. Mon Dieu, I thought, as I climbed back on my bike. That was an idea for a book.
And here I was having it in the last minutes of a two-month stay in Paris, where the book would have to be set and where I had done absolutely no research, and in fact this was the very first time I had ever even set foot on that particular bridge! Panic gripped my heart. I had f**ked up. Right royally!
It was a good idea, I could tell that, and I even knew straight away what the book would be called: We As In Yes, which played politely with my inability to come to grips with the French language. But it was now 7am and I was catching an 11am flight.
Merde!
Could I pull off the world’s quickest research coup in what few minutes — make that seconds — I had to spare? No, I could not. Of course I could not.
But nor did I need to throw myself into the murky depths of the Seine, because I had not wasted time, remember, I had taken it, and without doing so I wouldn’t be standing there having that idea in the first place.
Besides, if I was truly going to be in the business of pleasing myself, I could always come back, could I not?
So it is not ‘Adieu, Paris’, after all.
1. You don’t have to worry about turning 50 anymore. You did it already.
2. You don’t have to explain yourself if you can only come up with two reasons.
3. You don’t have to worry about your wrinkles because all the other 50-year-olds are too blind to see them without their glasses on.
4. You start noticing how elegant some older women are compared with the skanky barely-dressed younger ones.
5. You can wear really comfy shoes even if they’re not fashionable. This means you will not be one of the elegant women the other 50-year-olds are looking at. But on the plus side, your feet won’t hurt.
6. ‘Try being 64.’
It’s hard to talk about travelling a lot without sounding like a skite. So sorry about that …
I’m never happier than when I’m travelling, because I have itchy feet and being on the move scratches them.
Obviously some places make me happier than others. New York is my
favourite city in all the world, and the Ginger lives in a state of constant anxiety that one day I will just up and go there and never come home again. Or he says he does. But sometimes he’s smiling and looking a bit dreamy when he says it, so maybe I have that wrong.
Anyway, I can’t just up and go to New York forever because of all their fancy immigration nonsense, but I can still visit as often as they will let me.
I’ve loved the city ever since the Woody Allen movie Annie Hall. I wanted to be Annie Hall so much that when I was 16 I even dressed like her, although I have to say I couldn’t quite pull it off the way Diane Keaton could. She looked like a quirky sexpot. I looked like Mr Lynch. Who knew that baggy trousers and a tweed jacket could be so masculine on a square-jawed thickset girl of 5 foot 10?
Still, after Annie Hall and its spectacular follow-up, Manhattan — possibly Woody’s finest hour — it was the first city I desperately wanted to go to.
It took a while, but I’ve been lucky enough in recent years to spend quite a bit of time there: on three separate occasions I’ve rented an apartment and stayed for a month at a time, which is always my preferred method for getting to know a place. You start to feel like a local then. You work out where the best bagels are, and who has the least disgusting coffee, and what time the free-range eggs sell out at the Farmers Market.
One August I was staying in New York working on my novel The Wedding Bees, while the Ginger was back in Auckland keeping the home fires burning. My friend Richard had recently found love and moved to Atlanta, Georgia, rather wonderfully freeing up his Chelsea apartment and, even more wonderfully, letting me stay there for nix. Now that’s a friend!
I have a few in NYC — and you really only need one good one wherever you are, so I was having fun as well as getting lots of work done. Yes, it is work! Shut up. It is. Shut up. Oh, whatever!
Richard had kindly left his bike for me to use, and I’d grabbed it on occasion, but I felt a little nervy in the New York traffic.
Anyway, one Sunday I heard that the city was closing the whole of Park Avenue from East 14th Street, where it starts, up to East 79th Street, so that cyclists and pedestrians could wander up and down it for a few hours without any traffic.
Fifth Avenue has most of the fancy stores, like Tiffany & Co., but Park has some of the most expensive real estate in the world, and I figured to see it without a gazillion taxis and fast-walking pedestrians on their way to potential divorce meetings with high-powered attorneys, for example, could be a cool thing to do. Also, I felt I owed it to Greenacres’ Zsa Zsa Gabor: ‘Darling, I love you, but give me Park Avenue!’
So I got up early, jumped on Richard’s bike and headed on over, hitting Park Avenue at 18th Street and heading north. It was a glorious morning, and the city had never looked more strange or beautiful than when emptied of cars and taxis. There weren’t even that many cyclists out at that hour, and I barely recognised parts of the avenue thus denuded. It felt like being in a post-apocalytpic movie — only Tom Cruise was missing (probably doing origami at a Scientology conference).
At one stage, Park Avenue gradually rose up like a sort of bridge which I don’t think I had ever noticed, or perhaps had never been on, and I realised I was cycling towards, and then around, Grand Central Station: a gorgeous building from the inside, but even more stunning when you get a chance to circumnavigate it in the eerie quiet of a summer morning. I mean, New York is not a city that you expect to be quiet.
As I cycled away I realised I was crying. Not because I’d caught my flares in my bicycle chain (that will only happen two or three times before you re-think your flares), but because I felt so lucky to be me, to be there, to be having a New York moment on my own.
I know that’s goofy, but my point, and I do have one, is that you need to recognise these moments, because sometimes they’re all that stand between you and grabbing a carving knife to saw off someone’s ears.
I’ve had a few lucky-to-be-me moments. All of them have occurred post-measles, many have been on my travels. I remember the first as if it were yesterday — mind you, the setting was particularly glamorous.
We’d been invited to our dear friend Deborah’s fiftieth birthday party in Kenya. Yes, Kenya: home of the original RBS shenanigans. Deborah was having a fiftieth moment of her own. Her birthday is 24 December. Can you imagine anything worse?
Born and bred in Kenya, she had lived most of her life in London but still considered Africa home, so she gave all her friends a five-year warning that the only big birthday party she might ever have would be her fiftieth and be in Malindi, where her mother lives, on the Kenyan coast north of Mombasa.
You could give me five minutes’ warning of your fiftieth and I would find a way to be there, credit card willing, but five years was better.
The Ginger and I arrived at Malindi’s Driftwood Club on 20 December and, by the birthday festivities on Christmas Eve, all 35 of Deborah’s friends and family who had gathered from their various corners of the world had become good friends, and many of us remain so.
The party was a hoot: a barbecue around the Driftwood’s swimming pool followed by dancing, drinking, a lot of rubbish talking, and Deborah and I blearily watching the sun come up and counting our blessings.
That day, for our Christmas lunch, we cobbled together a simple but astonishingly delicious and colourful meal, which we shared with friends yet to depart; then, on Boxing Day, the Ginger and I flew into Tanzania, to the Serengeti National Park to begin a week-long safari.
Well, there was no point going all that way without attempting to see The Big Five … even if I didn’t know there was such a thing until I was practically being mowed down by one of them. The Big Five, in case you are similarly unschooled, are an elephant, a rhino, a buffalo, a lion and a leopard. At one time supposedly the toughest creatures to hunt down on foot, they are now the five that tourists aim to tick off their lists when they go looking.
We actually saw a lion eat a buffalo so that got rid of two or, more accurately, eventually one, while there were elephants left, right and centre. We did see a few rhinos — which can be tricky — and finally spotted a single leopard, so, yay us.
Anyway, I liked zebras. I could watch them forever. They’re so scatty! They all panic at the same time, and over absolutely nothing, which is what I sometimes do as well. Although I think if someone ate my baby I would not just run back into the crowd with all the other mothers and pretend nothing had happened.
Seeing how animals operate in the wild is an eye-opener the like of which I had not really contemplated. Sure, the eating each other side of things was a bit of a shock, but actually it was the NOT eating each other side of things that surprised me more.
I keep telling you I’m not a dang fool in the hope that you’ll believe me, but in some ways I am a dang fool. I had been so excited about going on safari to see all the animals, but in my tiny mind I had imagined all the different species living in separate parts of the Serengeti, neighbourhoods if you will, the way they do in a zoo, for example, but without the fences.
The very first thing I saw when we landed in our little plane from Arusha on the Serengeti air strip was an elephant with a family of baboons running behind it, a hippo in the background and a herd of zebras milling off to the side, scattering for no reason then regrouping, like a school of fish, facing a different direction.
The animals were all there, on this vast 15,000 square kilometres of open plain, together. How could I not have assumed that this was how it was? They actually don’t eat each other anywhere near as much as you would imagine.
We passed cheetahs lying in the sun on our way up to our lodge. Cheetahs! More baboons! Another elephant! A lodge!
Yes, we had decided to start our safari with two nights in the luxurious Mbalageti Safari Camp before getting back to basics as we travelled further east towards the Ngorongoro Crater.
We were shown to our ‘tent’, which was certainly not like anything I ever sweated the night through at a musi
c festival. If this was truly camping, then we’d all be doing it instead of pretending to have appendicitis at the first sign of a blow-up bed or guy-rope.
That first day at Mbalageti, after we’d screeched with excitement even louder than the baboons outside our window, we went on an evening safari and saw more animals than I could ever have dreamed. Giraffes loped past water buffalos, hippos waddled towards the creek, families of warthogs bustled comically across our path, more scatty zebras ran every which way, an alligator crawled up a creek, a bat-eared fox came out to watch, lions lolled in the fading sun, cheetahs were 10 a penny.
We slept in our four-poster bed, escorted to our tents by Masai wearing red shawls, the sound of elephants and naughty monkeys ringing in our ears.
The next morning, sitting on the outdoor breakfast deck, looking down across the endless vista at the giraffes and elephants and water buffalo and gazelles, as they grazed and gambolled between the trees, I felt an incredible warmth wash over me — literally from head to toe, then back up to my head again, where it rested on my smile.