As the pandemic finally ended and the borders started reopening, I took the Eurostar and went to Paris. If you have been reading this column for a while, you may know that the capital really isn’t my favourite place in the world. Still, going through the arrondissements in a cab made me feel very happy; after months of being separated from the fatherland, I was finally home.
This week, four years on, I spent an afternoon in Lille, killing time between two trains. I had never been there before and so used it as an opportunity to sample the local cuisine, walk around the historic city centre, and go to a museum. Something about it felt off, and it took me a few hours to realise what it was.
Lille just didn’t feel like home. At first, I amused myself by arguing that it was because Lille just isn’t very French. Have you seen where it is on the map? It’s practically Belgian!
You can see it in the architecture, which is reminiscent of Brussels, and in the dishes they serve, like the carbonnade, which I’d only ever seen in other countries. Really, we should give Lille away to someone else; the Belgians, maybe, as an apology for all the gags French people like telling about them.
After a while, though, my enthusiasm started waning. Was I, perhaps, the problem? I’d never spent any meaningful time in the north of France before. Well, or the whole eastern flank of the country. Or the south.
It’s actually easier to talk about the bits I know: Nantes, Brittany, Normandy, Vendée, Paris. That’s it.
In practice, this means that most of France feels entirely foreign to me. I walked around Lille and marvelled at the number of bars and restaurants that referenced Flanders. I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of signs were written in Dutch, on top of the usual French and English. Some of what people were eating on the terrasses looked alien and exotic.
I suspect I would feel similarly if dropped in the middle of Strasbourg tomorrow, or Marseille, or Lyon, or Toulouse. France is my country in some ways; in others, it just isn’t. What is interesting is that Britain is now the opposite. I wasn’t born there but I know it so well.
I’ve been to Brighton dozens of times, and I have visited nearly 10 English seaside towns over the past 15 years. I have been to Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool so often for work that I have my spots there – neighbourhoods I like and dislike, and pubs I’ve spent many merry evenings in.
Leeds instantly felt like home from the moment I first went there, and so did Glasgow; I’m not even sure why. Sometimes cities just make you feel at peace.
Edinburgh is now so familiar to me that it barely registers when I get into town. On more than one occasion, I’ve had to try to convince English friends to go and spend a weekend in Belfast, as I have been several times and always found it to be terribly underrated.
Some blind spots still remain. I would love to finally go to Wales and to Newcastle, for example – but the facts are there. I know Britain considerably better than I know France.
It isn’t exactly a surprising state of affairs, given that I moved here at 17, but it still is a slightly disquieting one. Who am I if I can’t even tell you what goes on in around 80% of the country I was born in?
Should I just give up and start the process to become a British citizen, even if I don’t really want to?
I’ll be honest with you: I have no idea. These are big questions and it’s too warm to think about them. All I’ll say in the meantime is this: the north of France has nothing on the western coast. So there.
