NOT BAD NOMAD

My hotel room balcony, Clamart.

I am back home but still floating in a nomadic space where 'home' is just the last bed you slept in and the last place you ate your breakfast. And despite the insecurity, strangeness and discomforts of that floating world, I must say it has its charm and its usefulness. For one thing it liberates you, temporarily, from the force of habit. Your time, your attention, your surroundings all undergo a transformation which may or may not be to your liking but it certainly kicks you in the inertia-zone and wakes up at least some of your somnolent neurons. I walked more, ate less, got up earlier, went to sleep earlier and thought less about myself than I have in a long time. Things which needed to be done got done and although a feeling of being a remotely-controlled robot occasionally surfaced, there were moments of zen-like discovery and intense engagement for which I am grateful.

My sister, continuing her astonishingly quick recovery, is going back to Rome with her daughter this week. They are together in Paris at the moment where Annie is enjoying her release from the prison, as she calls it, of hospital. I don't believe my presence was a factor in her speedy rehabilitation, she's got her own indomitable will for that. But maybe the old familiar rusty pattern of sisterly irritation takes on movement and meaning when seen out of an unfamiliar window.

Back a little later with report of the Cambridge Women in Comics Event which I attended on Sunday.

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HEADLESS BISHOPS AT BREAKFAST

The tables and chairs in the breakfast room at my hotel are wearing skirts, long golden yellow brocaded skirts. It looks like a gathering of headless bishops, an ecclesiastical convention imagined by the Surrealists. Surveying the scene from above is the always open eye of a television, pouring out old Disney cartoons dubbed in French, which makes the quacking and barking and squealing even more hysterical than in the native version. Plastic flowers and candles adorn the skirted tables. Breakfast is good: crusty baguette, croissant, butter, jam, orange juice, coffee.

Taking a shower is a daunting tour de force: if you make the fatal mistake of turning the hot tap on first, boiling water sprays you and the room from cracks in the long black rubber hose attached to the bath. Today the cold water tap fell off. There are no hooks to hang anything. Maybe the French have not yet discovered hooks. But I saw some of those suction ones in the Super U yesterday and if I were staying longer I'd buy a sackful and stick them everywhere.

I love this hotel. The friendly Moroccans who appear to be running it are philosophical about Things That Don't Work As They Should (c'est la vie) and will fix them almost as soon as possible.

My sister is definitely better. Yesterday we went for a walk in the streets around the clinic and today we'll do a longer walk. Mood has improved along with la santé. Please may it continue to be so.

THIS IS WHERE I AM NOW

Some photos of Clamart, a small town in the region called the Hauts- de- Seine where my sister is sitting, bored and fed up in a convalescence clinic and where I like my hotel room.
CLICK ON PICS FOR MUCH BIGGER VIEW.

MOVED AGAIN

This morning my sister and I travelled by ambulance out of the big Roussy hospital to a convalescent clinic further out of the Paris periphery, near a small provincial town. The doctor wants her to stay two or three weeks but Annie has never been one to do what she's told or to accept that she is not Superwoman. Her recovery from the operation, thanks to the brilliant skill of the surgeon, has been astonishing but she is still not fit enough to go back to 'normal' life. Arriving at the clinic, there was a bit of a kerfuffle - to use a gentle British euphemism for one hell of a drama - because the lady was not well pleased with the place or with anything, really.

Never mind. Things have calmed down now and I am installed in a cozy room in a small hotel in the town centre, with a WIFI connection that actually works. I like this area much better than where I was before, at least there's human life out there, not just cars. There are shops and restaurants, boulangeries and boucheries and coiffeurs (more coiffeurs than anything else, for some reason - maybe the ladies of the town are particularly hair-conscious). My hotel is one of those typically French romantic petits hotels where things that don't work (like the missing top of the hot water tap) are quite charming and attended to with casual good humour by the proprietor. I much prefer this to mass-produced anonymously efficient tourist-oriented establishments. My room is the kind where one could probably write a book, should one be so inclined. One is not, pour le moment, so inclined.

Pictures of some sort will be forthcoming, soon I hope.