Almost Back to Life

I haven't been going between Paris and London of late.

It's been more just getting rid of the working days in Paris to get back to London so that I can obey the housing association's ludicrous desire to have me out of my dad's flat. I was initially told July 22 but then in their letter, they said July 19.

Phone calls last week asking for someone in authority to look at the details of my plight don't seem to have borne much fruit. So I ferret away at my dad's flat before I come into work. I thought I cut rather a pathetic figure at 7.15am going through the papers.

Everyone's going on about the right to die and euthanasia what about the right to pick up the pieces in dignity?

I have to say the whole process of dealing with death is bleaker when there's no time to contemplate the minutiae of someone's life.

It's bad enough having to tear up letters and throw away pictures but doing it because some barbaric bureaucrat says there are deadlines to respect?

Yet it is not good to wallow in what was so to a certain extent it is good to be pushed. Part of the legacy is to embrace the what is and it struck me as I came into the Guardian this morning that I hadn't seen my children for more than a week. The little sweeties.

They're with their grandparents up in Bedfordshire and I speak to them but it is all very disorientating.

It's probably just as well that the football season is over and that I've been able to go out drinking on a Friday night in Paris with my mate Eric.

Friday night out? Well it was all so exciting. I even went to another arrondissement. I gawped in shock and awe at the wonders of the 18th.

More like I gasped in shock and awe after cycling up and down and round the labyrinth of streets to find the restaurant.

At least it was a freewheeling test of the bike's brakes down back into the 10th. Maybe next Friday we'll try somewhere on the flat plains.