I wonder has the cute waiter noticed I haven’t been in the last few days? I’ve had the flu so haven’t been going to my local cafe for my daily ‘cafe alongee avec un petit peu du lait (someday I’ll work out how type do the accents). The nice thing about Paris is that you can establish ‘local cafes and boulangeries’ pretty quickly and staff get to know you, at least if you have distinctively dreadful french and a red hat, both of which I do.

Anyway I have developed a crush on one of the waiters. He’s lovely. He always greets me with a big smile, a tad of chat (until about one and a half sentances in and my French breaks down) and in his crisp white shirt and smart black trousers, well he’s just a peach, in a French Prince William cleancut sort of way. He’s also about 22! Maybe younger! Certainly not much older. Which I am. I could be his mother if I came from a rather more dysfunctional and permissive background! But he’s just so cheery, fresh, happy and NEW looking. And that’s kind of new!

After all I have been spending alot of time lately with artists, and a more entertaining and funny bunch of ex-alcoholics, divorcees and depressives you couldn’t wish to meet, but compared to my shiny waiter in his shiny white shirt, they seem rather nicotined and life stained. I can suddenly see the appeal of younger women for men, it’s the hope some of their freshness might rub off.

Of course this being Paris, I should just have an affair with him. In fact if this was a French film, I the older jaundiced woman, channeling Isabelle Huppard, would just lure him into my web. Then I’d use him and abuse him in all sorts of sordid and louche ways, break his heart (becuase of course he’d fall madly in love/lust with me) then cast him aside with that innocent light in his eye extinguished and replaced by …’knowingness’.

Unfortunatly, as thirty somethings go, I fear I am a bit behind on the ‘knowingness’ front myself and the most sordid activities in my web involve illegally down loading ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ ,eating too much chocolate rice and avoiding writing. In fact he would probably scrabble quickly out of my writers web and into a proper pensional job for fear of ending up in a similar state of retarded adolesence in his late thirties.

As it is, he probably just views me as the slightly eccentric foreign woman who sits at the counter..watching him! Oh sweet Christ, I’m less Isabelle Hubbard then Dirk Bogarde in ‘Death in Venice’, complete with smudged makeup! Time to change cafes.