My dear friend

I hope this email finds you as well as it is possible to be in these bewildering times. Thank you so much for your lovely reply to the letter I sent last week. I do enjoy our correspondence and although you didn’t ask what happened after we left Brussels, I’ve taken it upon myself to fill this gap in your knowledge.

Continuing on my search of what to do and who to be, and unable to take myself seriously enough to tidy up my CV, I said to Adrian, ‘I know! I’ll turn myself into an influencer. I mean here we are in Europe after all, what a great opportunity to Create some Content.’ There was a pause as I took another bite of frites* before I continued: ‘So if I’m going to be an influencer, I’ll be needing you to be an Influencer Husband. He said, ‘What does an Influencer Husband do?’ I said, ‘You take photos of me, and say, “looking good, babe.”’ He said, ‘I think I can do that.’

We began in Bruges on the picturesque Boniface Bridge:

It’s an okay photo as far as photos are concerned, but it’s not going to influence anyone, is it? We couldn’t stop to take another one, because it’s summer and Europe and there’s a billion people wanting to take photos of each other on the Boniface Bridge.

We tried again the next day at the beer bar:

I don’t know whether you can tell from this, because I’m hiding it well, but I do get drunk quite quickly when I drink beer and this is my second glass.

In my defence, it was a very hot day. I grew up on the edge of the Australian desert, spent a decade living in the Middle East so I do know hot when I meet it, and I’m telling you that it was hot. We did one of the canal tours, thinking we were so clever for leaving it until the end of the day when it would be a bit cooler. But actually, the tours don’t go into the evening, they end in late afternoon. And when we were getting on the boat, our guide said, ‘Quickly please, this is the last trip of the day and I want to go home.’ And then crammed us on like hot sardines.

Also in my defence this is my third day in a row without data and it wasn’t getting any easier. I had to keep saying to Adrian, ‘Can you hotspot me?’ ‘Can I have your hotspot?’ And on the face of it that sounds exciting, but it’s actually extraordinarily tedious. Especially when you’re trying to establish your career as an influencer.

In the interests of full disclosure, my influencer career still hadn’t begun at this time, and I did pay full price for both my beers and for both of Adrian’s. More than full price if you take the exchange rate into account.

We persisted with our attempts at influencing as we moved from Belgium to France. If this doesn’t convince you to visit the Château de Chenonceau I don’t know what will:

The composition! The lighting! The wardrobe! The excitement I can barely hide from under the brim of my ill-fitting hat!

This was perhaps the most poorly-timed of all our must-do tourist experiences, coinciding as it did with the first week of school holidays. My goodness, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen so many people in one place at one time.

Later that day we were at Château du Clos Lucé which is where Leonardo da Vinci lived his final years, and this is where he died. It’s a lovely reprieve from the heat and the crowds because as well as the buildings, you can wander around the enormous grounds which include some wonderful installations inspired by da Vinci’s art or recreating some of his inventions.

‘Take a photo of me,’ I said to Adrian and because he knows he is an Influencer Husband he said, ‘Sure, babe’:

It’s me on a re-creation of da Vinci’s Self-Supporting Bridge. I thought I could create a piece of content with some kind of uber-metaphorical message. It would say: I know life sometimes feel shaky, but dig deep, bring your best self, and you’ve got this, babe. It would leave all my followers gobsmacked. I could already see the comments: “👏🫶🙌 I needed this today, babe, you always bring it just when I need it most.”

When we got to the other side of the bridge, Adrian—an engineer who has never crossed a bridge without stopping to look for struts and screws and bolts and beams—said, ‘It’s just an arch. And also it’s got columns.’ (Columns, in case you haven’t been hanging around with an engineer for the last thirty years of your life and don’t know, are one of life’s vital life forces). My metaphorical message crumbled.

We ended our trip to France with eighteen hours in Paris. We hadn’t intended to go to Paris at all. This fact shocked everyone we met. But we have been to Paris before, and we have never been to most of the rest of France. Plus, as noted above, school holidays had started by now. Also as noted above it was hot. Also as noted above, the exchange rate. All good reasons to stay away from Paris. But here we were and I found us a hotel which wasn’t too ridiculously expensive and also had air-conditioning.

The hotel was just a short walk away from the Cimetière du Montparnasse which is where Simone de Beauvoir rests with Sartre. I had never been there before, so we went and Adrian took several terrible photos of me of which this is the least worst:

I know Simone de Beauvoir is problematic, but I did find this to be a surprisingly moving time and I did have a little weep here. Partly, this is about taking a moment to realise some of my mum’s unrealised dreams. Partly, this is about the energy and love of all those people who continue to visit. Partly, this is about feeling homesick for the lovely life I have at home, but nonetheless acutely aware of all the things I have failed to do. Partly, it’s because I’m hot and tired and I’m in Paris and we haven’t planned a single thing.

Because we hadn’t planned a single thing, and because it’s peak tourist season and because it’s hot, the rest of our time in Paris was about not quite doing things. Here is Adrian once again standing outside the Louvre. He is perhaps the only tourist to have visited Paris so many times without once making it inside the Louvre:

And here I am deciding that our plan to walk in a loop from our hotel down to the Eiffel Tower and back again is way too ambitious for a hot day and anyway the Champs-Élysées is going to be as crowded as the Île de la Cité (Adrian wanted to see the Notre Dame being rebuilt, engineering and all that). And I’m very hot, and did I mention I’m not good with crowds?

I was a bit grumpy for the next hour or so because I was hot and hungry and I’m not good in a crowd, and because Adrian and I weren’t on the same page about what we should have for dinner. When we had finally “agreed” on something, Adrian ordered a beer and I ordered a wine. Adrian insisted on drinking his beer out of the bottle.

I said, ‘That’s uncouth. Drinking your beer out of the bottle.’

He said: ‘You’re the one with ice in your wine, how can you call me uncouth.’

I said, ‘That lovely young waiter who, in case you have forgotten is a waiter in Paris, suggested that he could bring me this bucket of ice to put ice in my wine. Are you calling a waiter trained in Paris uncouth?’

Then I took this photograph:

I said, ‘It’s to remind of that time when I was in Paris and you made me grumpy.’

He said, ‘Babe, do you think you need a photo to remind you of that?’

And then I laughed so hard I had tears. Because it’s like I always say, ‘It’s like my Dad always said, if you can’t laugh at your own jokes how can expect anyone else to?’

Clearly, my career as in influencer is over before it has even begun. From here, I admitted failure with trying to update my CV and I paid someone else to do it. They made me sound amazing, and I applied for a job! But it’s been two weeks since I submitted my application and I haven’t heard back. If anything changes I’ll let you know (I know you’re on tenterhooks!).

I’ll be back in your inbox maybe next week, maybe next year, but until then I will think of you often and with love.

Your friend,

Tracy

*a most frustrating combination of words—I started with ‘bit of frites’ which works nicely when spoken out loud if you pronounce the frites as you would in French thusly: bit of frit. But written, it looks better bite of frite because you can see a rhyme although there isn’t one unless you’re pronouncing frite incorrectly. On top of which, it excludes the ‘s’ which makes it even wronger. These are the things I grapple with moment to moment throughout my day and I guess it’s really no surprise I can’t get a job, eh?