Lovely.

Yesterday was a tricky day. I am tired, and filled with malaise, and my plans for summer employment have unfortunately fallen through. All this was made much better by darling S, my closest friend here in Paris, and our discovery of the Pink Flamingo Pizzeria on Rue Veille du Temple - perfectly thin, crispy base with parma ham and fig topping. Om nom nom. We then watched the Great Ormond Street documentaries recently shown on the beeb, wept alot, felt very small and insignificant, and then she went home and I watched the Glee 'Madonna' episode and laughed so much I snorted peppermint tea down my favourite cashmere cardigan. I am nothing if not classy. It was the perfect salvation-bringing end to a rubbish day.

Friends and fun here are something I have found difficult. I like fun. I love love love my friends and am loyal to a fault. I am used to having a large group of friends around me, plenty of social activites to say no or yes to according to my whims, and lots of variety. But Parisian 'fun' and my Parisian friends are very different to all this.

A 'fun' night out at home would typically consist of a large group of all my friends - boys and girls, lots of drinks, a nightlcub, some silly dancing, Mcdonalds at 2 a.m., and then hollyoaks omnibus the next day, curled up in wonderfully wallowy self-induced pain on the sofa with the girls. Obviously there are other things as well - barbeques, dinner parties, movie nights, snowball fights... Here, fun goes more to the tune of a lovely meal in a nice restaurant, a long stroll, perhaps a few glasses of wine, and then home to bed and an episode of SATC, alone, followed by a long brunch the next morning, all with the same one or two girls, who, out of the many people I've met here, are the only ones I genuinely like. (I hope that doesn't make me sound like a total bitch..) I rarely bother with 'clubs' here, they are extortionate and have excruciating door policies, and I prefer not to leave the fate of my night in the hands of a bouncer with an ego problem, preferring a bar and long long chats over cocktails. Explaining this to friends at home sometimes makes me feel slightly teenagery and squirmy - 'Will they think I'm a loser because I just don't like clubbing here..' Of course, this is just me being ridiculous. No one cares about what I do apart from me, and I think all my friends are relieved that they are no longer subject to my astonishly powerful hangovers, which always involve alot of self-pity, vomiting and moaning. Nevertheless, I find it a strange development. I wonder what will happen when i return to my old stomping ground next year - will I throw msyelf back into Jaegerbombs and tequila with gusto, or step back, preferring a slightyl more measured and less......bucolic approach? I am assuming the latter, as I feel rather 'been there, done that'-ish about the former, and Weightwatchers is obviously not compatible with such a lifestyle.

This whole paragraph sounds a bit preachy, and I don't mean it to at all - i LOVE a night out with a big group of friends, and miss dancing in a big group, arms round everyone, singing at the top of my voice, but clubbing with one or two others just isn't as fun for me. I think, grudgingly, that this is actually a question of confidence. I hate feeling like the lumpy friend in a nightclub, and yet I always feel like the lumpy friend in a nightclub here. Eek. Even writing that sentence makes me curl my lip in disgust. I'm not the lumpy friend, I never have been, and yet it is a feeling which I have found astonishly hard to shake here, hence my quest for better self-image and the Weightwatchers (which continues, wonderfully, to be easy, wonderful and is working, though more slowly than it did initially). Is this Paris? Or is it me? It certainly isn't my friends here; they are a select bunch, who are all supportive, gentle, and very good at understanding that I will never be up for a massive night out, and that I'll always be drinking Perrier. It certainly isn't my friends at home, they just think (i think..) that I'm being frightfully grown up and finally fully embracing my middle-aged tendencies (my inability to ever stay out past 1 a.m. is well known..) I suppose part of my dilemna with the whole 'night out' situation is that I know I can't feasibly go back to my slurring ways with shots - at least not quite to such an extent.. without undoing all my hard work with Weightwatchers, and it all being for nothing. SO..where does that leave me? Happy, and just in a very different place to where I was a year ago, perhaps a more 'grown-up' place. Sure, I can't wait for some amazing 21st birthdays in the summer, I can't wait to return to Oxford and celebrate the end of everyone's exams, but I am glad/happy/proud (?) to have discovered that a less frenetic and more minimalist approach to fun and friends can be just as enjoyable. This year has been a real journey, to lapse into cringe therapy speak, one which has continually surprised me, and this development - that I need neither a large group of friends nor a super-charged social life to be happy - has surprised me most of all. XxX