Absent falling coal

..except I don't think they were French. Not English, either, or at least not originally, but not French.

That aside, they were being sleazy French men.

Saturday, I was sitting having coffee with a friend, and a guy sitting at a nearby table came up to me and said:

"I just wanted to tell you you look fabulous"
"Er, thank you" (thinking, oh god, creep, and watching my friend being shocked/horrified/cracking up)
"May I join you?"
"Er, no, sorry, we're discussing rather private things, sorry"
"OH. Well, may I buy you another coffee?"
"No, I'm fine thanks"
"Oh. Well, I hope you have a good day, and you do look fabulous"
... and he left, and we cracked up.

Today, when I was walking back from the library up High Street, a guy ran after me. The conversation was largely similar, except without the coffee and with handing me an invite to a bible study group and asking if he could "get to know me as a friend". I was a bit more of a stuck record ("I'm sorry, I'm very busy") with this one, but he, like the other one, left me alone after a couple of minutes.

After a year of much worse in Paris, I'm really not that bothered. But why the hell are they all gonig after me? There were leggy blondes in miniskirts waiting to cross the road, why not them (rather than me in battered leather jacket, soft crumply boots, and a black/grey dress)?

Walking down Broad Street on my way to Blackwells, I heard shouts behind me calling my name.

I turned round, and saw a blonde girl dashing up to me, saying, "I just spotted you, we were at school together - Dodger?"

I'd recognised her straight away, she was 4 years below me and played oboe with me in orchestra and was, as she rightly pointed out, the Artful Dodger to my Mr Bumble. I suppose I should be grateful she didn't yell that out down the street, I think I'd have still turned round to it!

Like me, she was a huge geek, doing Latin A-level; she's on a gap year now, going to Paris later in the year, and then to Cambridge to study English.

It was terribly lovely, and somehow, terribly Oxford - of course, a perfectly logical place to bump into her.

Every time I go to Monoprix, whatever for, I come back with a different kind of tea[1]. They have very many. I now have much tea. I feel like a dirty philistine, though, as it's all in teabags and not leaf. The trouble is, I don't have the airtight jars to put leaf in - bags, I can keep in ziplock labelled bags and carry it round with me in my rucksack to and from Paris.

When I have my own home I'm living in for more the 3 months at a time, I shall buy such jars and leaf tea.

I want to hold teaparties again. I had such lovely tea parties in the first year, and I even won our term-long Afternoon Tea competition. People here don't like tea very much, though. Next year, I shall hold tea parties. I have a lovely big sitting room and I shall send round pidge invites a week in advance (and then email everyone to remind them, if people are like my previous guests used to be with bits of paper beautiful invitations, and then I shall prepare and lay everything out beautifully and then people can come and descend on my room from 4pm and all will be wonderful.


I could have made this horribly dramatic, but I've had gin and now had tea and I'm gently prodding law, so I couldn't be bothered really. But it's the thought that counts, right?

[1] I also come back with milk, but that's because I always need to buy milk. Tea is not necessary in quite the same way, in that I have already got a shelf full of it.