26 Fruits

A few days in Paris in November. The weather’s pretty much the same as in London, the two cities are cloaked in grey at this time of year. But I enjoy the change and, surprise surprise, I can even enjoy doing some Christmas shopping in Paris.

I sat in the café at Printemps for a mid-morning coffee. It struck me as strange that here I was in Autumn, in the lead-up to the Winter festival, in a shop whose name means Spring. But perhaps not so strange when we spend so much of our writing lives imagining ourselves at a different time, in a different place, as a different person. “We’ll always have Paris,” as Bogart said to Bergman in Casablanca. Travelling gives you memories that you store away and reuse as imagination.

It’s what I enjoy most about writing. Just before going to Paris I heard a travel writer on Radio 4 say something like this: “Travelling is about becoming someone else not just about going somewhere else.”

While travelling to Paris on the Eurostar train, I wrote some more words for a story I’ve been writing about Aracena in Spain. I’ll return to normality – in my writing mode – with some paragraphs about storytelling for a business client in Australia. More imagination to remember, more memories to imagine.

I don’t have to go somewhere else to write specifically about that place. But I do find the act of going to a different place helps me to write better and with more enjoyment about anything, any place. The last thing a writer should do is lock himself away, day after day, in a garret to write – even if you call the garret a library, a garden shed, a study or an office. There’s a world outside; it feeds the world inside.