Every day my Facebook homepage is cluttered with glitzy notifications like ‘Erasmus Party – international fun every Thursday’; ‘American Disco Multilingual wants to add you as a friend’, or Paris Universities Greek Verse Choir has sent you an invitation’. I could easily be out as much as the average pro-plus addicted fresher. And yet here I sit, on my midweek day off, cross-legged on my bed, bright-eyed and fresh-faced, having refrained from going out last night, and typing a column for you all with just one coffee in my system. This, dear friends, is a regular turn up for the books. 

Last Saturday, I had an invitation to frivolities during Paris’s annual Nuit Blanche, where there are art installations all along the Seine and an all-night party held on a metro. It was totally my scene, but I was tired from reading philosophy all week and slept instead. Because you know what? Firstly, going out when your body says, ‘oh God, please no’, isn’t that fun (hey there, party-mad past self, this may seem tres stupid now, but after doing this fifty or so times, you may attain enlightenment). And secondly, moving abroad for a year really makes you think about friendship. How did you form bonds in the first place? How can you maintain them even when far away? And how, for the love of God, can you form new ones that might also be culturally and linguistically beneficial?  

Socialisation is a massive part of feeling okay – when other people are there you feel less scared of life, more comfortable (like, why is an empty house scary, but you wander round happily and ignore creepy wall noises when there is even one other person with you?). I’m actually happy I have a room-mate, because I don’t have to deal with any of the kind of horror movie terrors that pop into my head when I draw back the shower curtain, or when the wind blows the window closed. But on a deeper level, contact with people you like, who make you feel good about yourself, makes you feel good, and sometimes going out to all of the blow-out parties where you down countless shots and think the guy in the queue is your soulmate are not the best places for forging life-affirming friendships. When drunk, I love and cherish absolutely everyone even if I don’t know them, which makes me seem mad and creates a bit of a social minefield later. 

So, now that I’m a stranger in a strange land, I’m taking it easy. It’s really weird. At Cambridge, I normally go out a lot, looking for a release from work and obligations and, sometimes, feeling very low. Now that I’m living abroad, I feel that there are other things to do, like getting into burning essential oils, listening to albums all the way through, and looking forward to an easy coffee or beer date with a gal pal (a genderless, useful phrase I learnt from an episode of ‘Friends’).

What a fucking sappy hippy right? But if you wander round Paris on any given day, you’ll see people taking a long lunch break, or buying cheese that’s so expensive you’d think it had gold-dust in it, or getting inappropriately into a drum and base number on their headphones on the metro. People here like the finer things in life, they like to indulge, and live life to the full in between all the expectations and responsibilities. It’s refreshing to see this outlook and to feel a part of it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my time in Paris, it’s just to sit down, chill the fuck out and then maybe bake a cake full of rainbows and smiles and eat it together, or something. So, despite not being drunk, I bid you all adieu from Paris with love.