Hi!
Well, this isn’t exactly true. Today isn’t any day; it’s my birthday. I’m 32! It’s an entirely unremarkable age, but it is a birthday nonetheless. I’m going to be eating pasta and drinking wine later to celebrate but, in the meantime, I have an offer to make you.
If you take out a paying subscription to this newsletter in the next 48 hours, it will cost you (roughly) five pounds a month, down from the usual seven. Happy birthday to me, and to you also!
Exactly one great piece
listen, no point in lying here, I’ve been doing very little actual serious reading this week, but this piece by Sarah Jeong on Twitter (what else), that time she got ~cancelled~, and what the internet does to us is really really good, and a great obit of sorts
A column
I’m writing this on the train from Nantes to Paris and I am, if I’m honest, relieved. I’m not happy to be leaving France per se; mostly just pleased to be thinking in English again. There was an announcement a few minutes ago about the fact that we would shortly be arriving at the gare d’Angers, which just sounded like Gare Danger to me. A dangerous station.
I don’t really speak French anymore, because all my old French friends have now left London and I never managed to make any new ones. It’s an odd thing, really - in 14 years, you’d think that I would have managed to meet at least a few of my countrymen there. Somehow, I haven’t. That’s probably a topic for another time, seeing as I’m still not sure why that’s the case. Let me figure it out first then get back to you.
The man on the train told us we were nearing Angers and my brain parsed it wrong and it had to make an effort to parse it right after that, and that’s why I’m happy to be going back to London. It’s been a week. My brain is tired. It needs a rest.
I guess I sort of knew that this day would come eventually but I wasn’t sure when it would. When I was in high school a friend told me about her aunt, who’d lived in Britain for so long that she now spoke French with an English lilt, and I remember finding the whole thing silly. How could you possibly lose the language you were born in?
I don’t speak French with an accent but I keep misplacing words. My sentences have an odd rhythm to them because I’ll talk very fast, as I always do, then notice that I am headed towards a word I can’t quite remember so I slow down, nearly to a stop, while I frantically rummage inside my head.
Sometimes the word comes to me and I pick up the pace again; sometimes it doesn’t and so I make the most of that thing foreigners make fun of us for, and I huff and shrug and make some sort of hand gesture then pick up the sentence later on. I thought people wouldn’t notice it but my brother did, and that wasn’t a great feeling.
It’s also not a problem I have in English. If anything, I have too many English words to choose from. I can start speaking and decide to describe something and the words will fight each other to make it to my mouth, like animals rushing out of a doorway in a cute cartoon. English flows out of me, ceaselessly, while French has become a rusty old tap that stops and starts.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Young Vulgarian to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.