Corbett - A town like Paris: falling in love in the city of light

Contents

For Shay, who inspires me daily.

And for my parents,

who have always been there for me.

Writing should be testimony to the vast flow of life through us.

VICTOR SERGE

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

T. S. ELIOT

Chapter 1

Are You Sure Youve Got the Right Person?

I N JANUARY 2000 the world was flush with the excitement of a new millennium, and I was crossing a continent on a day-return train ticket to do an interview for a job I wasnt the least bit interested in.

It was a typically gray European winters day, the kind that makes you wonder when you last felt properly warm and why you left your sun-drenched homeland in the first place. On the tray table in front of me, a collection of barely opened books told the riveting tale of European economic integration. I knew the tale was riveting because I had fallen asleep over it three times in the last hour. Outside the flat, featureless plains of Picardy flashed by in a dark brown blur. I hunkered down in my seat and wondered who the hell I thought I was kidding and what the hell I was doing here in the first place.

It had all started one dull November afternoon in the newsroom of the twenty-four-hour TV news channel for which I worked in London. As a showbiz producer for Sky News, my job consisted of keeping track of the tedious intricacies of the lives of inherently dull, inexplicably famous people. This particular afternoon saw me flicking listlessly through copies of Hello!, OK!, and other quality celebrity mags under the pretense of doing my job.

Finished with my research, and motivated by the kind of pure boredom that I felt at least seven or eight times an hour in that job, I wandered over to the nearby cluster of desks occupied by the business reporters.

Financial news commanded almost as much importance in the minds of Sky Newss editors as entertainment news, occupying the small portion at the end of every news bulletin that was not otherwise dedicated to soccer, royals, or whatever shock crime wave they were manufacturing on any given day. As a result, the finance reporters were at least as underutilized as we showbiz reporters, leading to much crossing of the corridor, bored chitchat, and the occasional perusing of one anothers magazine collections. While our repository of showbiz and gossip rags were especially prized in the greater newsroom environmentand hence were often stolentheir piles of The Economist and BusinessWeek were usually left unopened.

It was only out of abject desperation, and some perverse idea that its contents might serve to expand my mind, that I picked up a copy of The Economist and started flicking through it. On previous sorties into the dense geopolitical realm of The Economist, my sense of the absurd had been piqued by the jobs section. If youve ever had the pleasure of perusing it, you will know that the job advertisements there are weekly exercises in bureaucratic nonsense. The Economist is where you advertise any job that should otherwise exist only in a comedy sketch or an Evelyn Waugh novel. For instance, its where the Ugandan Ministry for Roads might post a half-page advertisement for a new Deputy Director of Road Leveling.

The successful applicant will have at least five years road-leveling experience at an international level, must be familiar with the latest global standards for gutters, be good with concrete, be a dab hand at dealing with troublesome secessionist rebel soldiers, and be in possession of a license to operate heavy road-leveling machinery. The Ugandan Ministry of Roads is a nonsmoking workplace and an equal opportunity employer.

Its quite common to find within The Economists job section ads for project directors for far-flung fieldwork in random West African nations, for which, mysteriously, the speaking of fluent Finnish always seems mandatory. In between guffaws and inner monologues on the shocking waste of taxpayers money that was routinely channeled into the creation of these absurd jobs, I happened upon one advertisement that caught my eye:

The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) is seeking a Director of Communications. ICC is the world business organization. The applicant will be responsible for the global communications strategy of the organization. He/she must be familiar with the work of the ICC and have at least five years experience as a PR and communications director of an intergovernmental or nongovernmental organization of similar international stature. He/she must have demonstrated managerial experience and at least ten years experience in an executive role in the private or public sector. The candidate will be experienced in the creation and implementation of effective media and communications strategies. He/she will be fluent in French and English and have excellent writing and organizational skills.

And then, almost apologetically, at the end:

The successful candidate will be required to relocate to Paris and be expected to undertake regular international travel.

I did a quick mental checklist of my work history and concluded I was hopelessly underqualified for the job. I didnt have any of the experience they were looking for, I knew nothing about international organizations, my French was rusty from years of neglect, and I neither knew nor cared what the ICC was, what it did, or who it represented.

What I did know was that I had always dreamed of living and working in Paris, that I was nothing if not creative when it came to CVs, and that one more month spent in London, doing the daily early morning shuffle out to the industrial park in far west London that Sky News called home was surely going to kill me.

I took to my computer and bashed out a letter of application, making a few judicious changes to my patently unsuitable rsum. A spot of finance reporting here, a sustained period of economic analysis thereanything to make my gossip-columnist past and entertainment-producer present seem less obvious to a bunch of suits in Paris.

Three weeks later an in-depth editorial conversation with colleagues about the new Britney Spears single was interrupted by the shrill ring of my telephone. On the other end of the line was an English gentleman, introducing himself as Lionel from the ICC in Paris, asking if I was available for interview.

It will require you to come to Paris for the day, I am afraid, he explained. It seems our secretary-general is very interested in your rsum, and she would like to meet you.

As I frantically tried to recall the extent to which I had embellished my rsum, I found myself agreeing to a rendezvous in Paris in a weeks time.

What a hoot! A fully funded day trip to Parisa chance to escape the office, scarf a few crepes, and sink a carafe of Bordeaux or two in my favorite city in the world. Sure, the hour of the actual interview might prove a little awkward, and the ensuing embarrassment when they discovered that I was a patently underqualified charlatan might be a tad uncomfortable, but for the sake of a free trip to Paris, it was a risk I was willing to take. Besides, it would make for a great story at my next dinner party.