France | Good Times

I was very careful, ahead of my hiking weekend with Seth in France, to avoid doing anything that might cause me injury. I took it easy in the gym, I skipped leg day (hiking’s no fun with sore thighs), I ate well, I rested. Acutely aware of my luck with such things, I took every precaution to preserve my bodily health; I didn’t want anything to spoil my big, restorative weekend away in the Occitanie countryside – and god, I needed it after so many months of solid work in London’s great metropolitan marsh. God must have a wicked sense of humour, however, because the evening before my flight, my phone rang. It was Seth.

“Mate, you’re not gonna believe this. I’ve smashed my feet up at work.”

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AK ’23 | Last Legs Pt 2

Shit. How deep had my sleep been?! Annie’s flight was 11am, and we’d been intent on staying awake all through the night ahead of it. We’d failed, obviously – and as an extra kicker, apparently I’d been irretrievably catatonic. After everything – our three week adventure – we hadn’t even been able to say goodbye. My stomach twisted with guilt and confusion. Surely not. How?! 

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AK ’23 | Last Legs Pt 1

On our final day together, Annie and I spent the afternoon in a relaxed fashion: we found a cafe near Leah’s place and sat down to write and eat cake. It was a trendy, young place, Scandi-chic, far less intimidating than the bistros of central Paris with their chalkboard menus covered in dense, illegible scrawl. On one of the cafe’s exterior walls, facing a sidestreet, somebody had spray painted a vaguely left-wing proclamation in French, translating roughly as ‘down with fascism!’. A little further down the street, someone else had written ‘hipsters fuck off’.

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AK ’23 | The Destroyer of Molluscs

We did Paris stuff on our second day in Paris; tourist bits, lots of walking. I love walking in big cities – doesn’t matter how far. I love walking anywhere, just trundling along chatting and looking at things. It might actually be my favourite thing to do, now that I think about it. I’m 30 years old and I’d genuinely rather take a one-hour stroll through a park than spend five hours in some swanky rooftop bar with a pool. Annie is not as fond of walking as me, which is why I always have to lie to her about the distances it says on the map.

“So how far is it to this cemetery?”

“It’s just, uhhhh…” I glanced at my phone: 43 minutes to Père-Lachaise. “Another twenty mins or so.”

“Ugh.”

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