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This is unusual, Paris.

I’ll be with you in a few hours, pretty much by the time this is aired. Someone beautiful asked me last night if I was looking forward to you and I said: it’s pretty normal now but yes, I am still looking forward to Paris. As much as I’m looking forward to my return to London and its romance in the air? I’m trying to balance things out here! The next question was: who’s in Paris? Ok, let’s be sensible here! My Paris calendar is already filled up with project activities and it’s going to be a very short stay; I won’t even have time to flirt. Hang on – there’s always time to flirt – mostly innocently; it’s me we’re talking about.

The exuberant sun is penetrating into the boat’s kitchen from behind the Albert Bridge – this is also unusual that I write to you not from an intimate corner either in my bedroom downstairs or my bed in Nation. There’s a pair of Egyptian geese on the deck of the fancy barge across the pontoon and they’re also not having an intercourse so I feel better about my restless self this morning. Is this also unusual? Well, I feel comfortable and reassured by what could otherwise be seen as mundane – oh, don’t you just dream of attaching that word to a slightly crazy poet living on a barge in Chelsea but spending a lot of time in Paris and on the road – or in her head in general?

I’ve to leave in a couple of hours from now if I want to enjoy the Eurostar lounge and I haven’t packed a single thing other than my passport. Well, that really doesn’t count when I have my passport on me all the time – just in case; I have a hard time saying no to Paris especially with my reward points sitting on my Étoile status. I should be more reasonable, some might say, but should I really? I don’t think being reasonable ever got me far with anything. So, let’s be unreasonable and full of dreams, though that would not be unusual for me.

London has made me feel like it’s only got eyes for me recently – that’s unusual – and that makes me bite my lip with passion and creativity – two poems and a monologue in two weeks? We’re on the verge of hypercreativity for an otherwise unprolific poet here! Have you only got eyes for me, Paris? Well, there’s no competition. And if it ever seems like you’re not on my mind when I’m busy romancing around London, or at a picnic by a pond in a beautiful forest with flamboyant friends, that’s only because you are already part of me.

No one has made it to that status. Just yet.

And what happens when that happens?

That might be the time to be even more unreasonable and make my heart so portable that it doesn’t matter where I am or whom I’m with I’ll still feel whole. Yet just.

Either way, when in doubt, the best course of action would be to keep doing something to keep the dreams alive while continuously updating them, for that is the secret to living the dream. Constantly. My daughter once said, having witnessed how my life unfolds, like a dream, “my mother doesn’t dream; she just does”. That’s high praise for someone who sometimes worries about yesterday, only for the potential of having hurt someone unintentionally, including myself.

Never about tomorrow, though.

Tomorrow is always a wonderful surprise, even from yesterday’s point of view. Yes, I’m talking about today. I’m talking about the present moment, when the world is reaching out to my senses and my senses are reaching into myself. Reading. Listening. Sniffing. Touching. Tasting. All the deliciousness of life, of living in the moment, like a little bird.

londres, le 19 avril 2026

je t’embrasse !

d.o.