Digital Fictions and other Ephemeral Writings

About a dozen years ago I was teaching a course on analysing digital texts, those texts that can only be read on computers and that used the affordances of computer technology in their production.  The course included hypertext fiction, digital poetry and novels using adobe flash interface to tell their stories with words, images and music. Fascinating stuff.

I recall one of my luddite colleagues making an off-handed comment about the texts on my syllabus just being fads of technology and not real ‘literature.’ I admitted that there was some truth to that in the sense that technologies develop and change so quickly, other ways of writing creatively using new digital platforms are likely to come along. I shocked my colleague even more by saying that my course was likely to become superfluous in the coming years as digital texts become more common and would be studied alongside print books as part of courses on literature and critical studies. (That was me talking in a world that is ruthlessly territorial when it comes to who teaches what. I was always an odd fit in academia.)

In a recent interview, the British Library’s curator of digital publications, Giuilia Carla Rossi, noted that many ‘born-digital’ works, like the ones on my old course, are structurally and technically more complex than the pdfs and e-books we use today. These older publications – by that, I mean even eight years old – relied on the software and hardware they were designed for. With changes in computer technology, these works are no longer accessible. Painfully, that has been the case for a couple of the digital poems I used in my book Digital Textuality. These innovative multimodal poems were produced on Adobe Flash, which was discontinued in 2020.

Other texts analysed in my book have been rescued by digital archivists. The much-praised Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson first appeared in 2001 as a floppy disc (remember those?) with embedded specialist software. This hypertext fiction, where you can choose different paths to reading it, is a wonderful retelling of Frankenstein with a female monster. To read this work when I was teaching it, a CD driver was required. How many of us have computers with CD drivers in them these days? Luckily, thanks to digital archivists, Patchwork Girl is now available online as a download. This is because it was a seminal work in hypertext fiction. Other lesser-known works in this sub-genre have evaporated.

My prediction spoken to my colleague turned out to be too true, and many digital texts are now just texts. Digital Textuality only had one edition. But I don’t mind. Firstly, I managed to get a few articles and book chapters published on the back of this book. Secondly, these digital works and studies about them are not all that different from the many stage plays out there that are never recorded, and their scripts never published. As a former playwright, I’ve grown to accept that. Plays and their performances are re-experienced in our memories. Perhaps that makes me less clingy when it comes to digital texts and the short shelf life of my writing about them.

As I was taking a break from putting together this blog, I happen to read John Naughton’s latest column in The Observer, where he has coincidently taken up a similar topic. Naughton points out that we shouldn’t assume our stored digital data is going to be around forever. Not only is the technology changing in ways that make our digital artefacts inaccessible, but the companies that store these artefacts could go out of business, taking our data with them. WordPress, the platform for this blog, recognises the concern among its bloggers that our work might not last in perpetuity and has offered us a solution. For a fee of $38,000 WordPress will secure ‘your online legacy’ for 100 years.

Dear Reader, I’m afraid you’re going to have to treat this blog, like so many digital texts, as a fleeting thing, a mere transient writing of the moment.

Reading around the war in Gaza

With all the news coverage of the situation in Israel, I hadn’t planned to read any books on the topic any time soon. When taking in such horrible and complex news, I tend to mix reportage with commentary, newsprint with television and podcasts, trying to make sense of it and to distinguish between factoids and misinformation. All the while, I’m too aware that the unfolding humanitarian crisis is being presented in ways intended to tug on heartstrings and stir up anger. I thought I was getting close to my news saturation point with this war.

But then, I realised that two books I happen to be reading these days are related to this conflict. Both books draw from personal accounts of well-known and documented events of the twentieth century. One is The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland, a non-fiction book I mentioned earlier this year, having first heard the author talk about it in an interview. The other book, Le Pays des Autres (The Country of Others), is Leila Slimani’s reimagining of the lives of her French grandmother, Mathilde, and Moroccan grandfather, Amine, who settled in his native Morocco post-WWII during the fight for independence from France.

These stories overlap during the Second World War, presented in Slimani’s book in flashbacks of Amine fighting for the French colonisers when he met and fell in love with Mathilde. The Middle East as we know it today was geopolitically constructed by western powers of the past two centuries through force and exploitation. In the aftermath of WWII, Muslim cultures revolting against the West and their allies reverberated across North African to the eastern Mediterranean. As Slimani taps into this resentment and deep-seated hatred of the French in post-war Morocco, it’s hard to not make parallels with the contemporaneous creation of the state of Israel and the consequences of years of deadly conflicts.

The first half of The Escape Artist is set in Auschwitz during the war while the mass murder of Jews was taking place and follows the story of Walter, a Slovakian Jew, who was deported to a labour camp at the age of 18 and miraculously escaped two years later with a fellow Slovakian prisoner. These escapees kept mental records and described what they witnessed in forensic detail to Jewish leaders in Slovakia. The second half of the book recounts the difficulties in getting governments across the world to act on this Auschwitz Report before thousands more were killed, and the story continues with Walter’s troubled personal and political life after the war. Such events related to the war have been referred to throughout this most recent war in Israel.

Both books present the complexities of ethic bias and hatred, highlighting the sense of otherness with an awareness of inexplicable contradictions. Even though Amine has married a French woman and appears to harbour a secret esteem for the French, he becomes violent with rage when he learns that his sister is having a relationship with a Frenchman. By taking the narrative to the years following Walter’s escape, Freedland’s book covers the stories of Jewish leaders who collaborated with the Nazis to save their own families and who after the war – with nothing to personally gain – became character witnesses for Nazis that were put on trial. When the current Israeli conflict is looked back on, I suspect we’ll find similar sentiments and anomalies.

While I hadn’t intended on reading any more about the Gaza conflict beyond the daily news reports and their commentaries, it seems I have. This makes me even more aware of colonialism and the Second World War being as much about the present as they are about the past.

My Week in Anger

‘She’s gone,’ David said to me this morning as I was unpacking the groceries. I knew who he meant. Several days ago the British Home Secretary Suella Braverman had made more of her notorious offensive, divisive and ill-informed comments. This time, her targets were the pro-Palestinian, also known as pro-ceasefire,  protesters who were planning a march in London on the same day as the Remembrance Day ceremonial at the Cenotaph (for USians – this is Veterans Day and every year, there’s a marching band and a minute of silence at 11.00 around the memorial). Braverman referred to the protest as a ‘hate march,’ strangely comparing it to ‘terrorists’ marches’ once seen in Northern Ireland. The Metropolitan Police had already authorised the march to take place, to which Braverman added that the police were playing favourites. Clearly, she’s borrowing from the Tr*mp handbook.  First of all, logistics – the Armistice minute of silence was to be held far from the peace march, which was heading towards the US Embassy clear on the other side of London.  Braverman was using populist-style misinformation to create an enemy. Secondly, as Home Secretary, Braverman should not be criticising an institution (the MET) which is part of the government. That too is what populists do – make the state an enemy of the people.

Some five days have passed since her comments were published in an article she authored for The Times. While Braverman’s words received a lot of condemnation, they also sparked far-right counter protesters to show up at the march.  The few arrests made were mostly of the far-right counter protesters who were spewing out hate and acting violently. Finally, this morning the Prime Minister has sacked his Home Secretary. ‘Yessss,’ I said to David with a fist pump. Braverman’s gone. A reason to rejoice? Not really. I recall Boris Johnson having to resign as a disastrous Foreign Secretary only to come back as an even worse Prime Minister.

Is anger a wasted emotion? I grew up thinking that it was pointless, and as a female I was criticised any time I displayed so much as an ounce of it. These days I think that some anger is useful. It ignites people into action against the many wrongs in our societies, such as protesting against the military-led humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Another source of anger in recent days has come from the latest polling in America. We’ve all known for a while that Tr*mp is the likely Republican nominee, but now it looks like he stands a fair chance of being president again. I don’t have to spell out what this could mean. I’m angry at Americans who have fallen for this cult figure and at the media for giving him excessive airtime and column inches. I’m angry too at Americans who despise the orange man, know that he is unfit for public office, but vote for him because they’ve always voted Republican.

Underneath anger one often finds fear. Some of the anger I feel towards the likes of Braverman, Tr*mp and their ilk is because I see them as dangerous. The right wing of the Conservative party seems hell bent on destroying some of our democratic institutions – our membership in the EU, the courts, the police and the civil service. Tr*mp and co have attacked the FBI,CIA, Justice Department and other offices of government that, though flawed, keep democracies functioning.

I’ve just learned that Suella Braverman’s replacement is James Cleverly, who was Foreign Secretary. The new Foreign Secretary is the former PM David Cameron, the same PM who engineered the European Referendum that gave us Brexit and who departed in disgrace. Since Cameron is no longer an elected member of the House of Commons, he has obtained this position through being a member of the House of Lords. That is, King Charles has just made him a Baron. Last week’s tragedy has become this week’s farce.

Writing – from teenage journal to adult essay

In 1977, Kahlil Gibran was cool. The artist, poet and philosopher was well-suited to 60s and 70s America. Best known as the author of The Prophet, Gibran’s words appeared on posters of serene landscapes, sunrises and out-of-focus lovers. Some posters included his drawings, reminiscent of William Blake, also popular at the time. Quoting Gibran was in fashion for the lecture circuit of peddlers of consciousness – creative consciousness, spiritual consciousness, universal conscious – everything was consciousness. This was the background that  Christmastime of 1976, when my teenage self purchased the 1977 Kahlil Gibran Diary. Every other page had a quote from the famous poet alongside a blank page for me to write in daily. I’ve held onto this Gibran Diary all these years though I would call it a journal these days.  It’s been stored in various locations in America, shipped across the Atlantic and stowed away and moved to various locations across Britain. Many pages are yellowed and it holds a slightly dusty mildew odour.

Today, living in what I suppose is the last third of my life, I’ve started re-examining the first two-thirds and mining my early journals for writing material. Opening this 1977 book for the first time since I was writing in it, I was hit in the face by my naïve teenage musings – obsessed with sex and death – and dreams of a grown-up life. Worse still, I came up against my own poor writing. I mean this in two senses of the word writing. My penmanship was painful to read with letters crunched together for most words with others stretched out as if taking a breather from my nervous hand. While my school report cards shined with top marks, the teacher’s comments inevitably included something about my illegible handwriting. For the other sense of writing, I was creative and could devise little narratives with quirky characters, using humour and descriptive imagery, but hopeless with the mechanics of writing. I wrote as I spoke in fragmented sentences – or their painful cousin, the run on sentence with a string of dependent clauses. I pretentiously employed erudite terms, often hitting the wrong tone or leaving my reader bemused. It’s easy to say this and analyse it now, but I do feel some mortification on behalf of my younger self.

Mediated by the journal, this conversation with teen me has brought back those formative years, the role of new age spirituality in a life riddled with family dysfunction. I wonder to what extent I was a product of that time period in American social history. Many political and social aspects of the mid 1970s escaped my notice then, being preoccupied with family and school life and most frighteningly with what was happening to my body. The Kahlil Gibran quotes, by the way, may have been read, but I rarely commented on them or used them to inspire my own writing. I’ve realised that if I’m to convert these writings into an essay, I can’t trust the limited memories or understandings of a teenager. Adding a political and sociocultural context to my young life gives me a chance to share my adult knowledge and build on it at the same time. What is the point of a writing project that I can’t learn anything from?

Okay, I’ve written about it – now if I can only get back to writing it.

How Grammar Might Influence the World We See

Have you ever wondered if speaking a different language could change the way you perceive the world? It’s a fascinating question that has captivated linguists and researchers for decades. While many have assumed that our thoughts and feelings are by and large universal, emerging research suggests that the language we speak can significantly influence the way we see the world, creating differences for speakers of different languages.

The idea that language can shape our perception of the world is not a new one. It’s often associated with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which claims that the structure and vocabulary of a language can determine or at least influence the way its speakers think and perceive reality. The Sapir-Whorf examples using Native American languages have been discredited over the years. Yet, growing evidence supports the idea that language can indeed mould our thoughts and experiences.

One of the most intriguing studies exploring the relationship between language and perception comes from research conducted on the Aboriginal language of Murrinhpatha in Australia, reported in the current issue of Scientific American. Murrinhpatha has free word order, where subjects, verbs and objects can occur in any position in a sentence. In the study, Murrinhpatha and English speakers were shown the same image of a woman. Monitoring the eye movements of the participants revealed that English speakers focused first on the woman, then on what she was doing (perhaps looking at her hands) and finally on other features in the background. This reflects the tendency in English to have the subject first in the sentence followed by the verb and then adverbial phrases that describe the circumstance or background. Murrinhpatha speakers had faster eye movements that darted around the images, often taking in the background features first and then the foreground and back and forth again. The linguists involved suggest this could be the result of free word order.

While it doesn’t prove that language completely determines thought, it suggests that different languages can indeed shape the way their speakers experience the world around them.

This article also mentions something that has been troubling me for a while. So much of linguistics research and the resulting textbooks have come from scholars of the English language and to a lesser extend from similar Romance and Germanic languages. Most of the work that has followed in Chomsky’s footsteps in their obsession for universal properties of language and language processing has been based on a group that represents less than 5 percent of the total number of world languages. As the psycholinguist Evan Kidd put it, ‘The search for universals took place in only one corner of the language universe.’

As I write this, I’m working on an editing job for a Chinese post-graduate student who is trying to apply Chomskian principles and their descendants to Chinese grammar. While the student (and I as an editor) struggle with this assignment, I often wonder how different this would be if Chinese scholars developed generative grammars first before Chomsky.

Back to the beautiful diversity of language, Scientific American has this to say about the work conducted by the recent study: ‘…each language represents a unique expression of the human experience and contains irreplaceable knowledge about the planet and people, holding within it the traces of thousands of speakers past. Each language also presents an opportunity to explore the dynamic interplay between a speaker’s mind and the structures of language.’

To listen to Murrinhpatha, check this out.

Talking Terrorism

Are Hamas terrorists? The BBC and its presenters have taken a lot of flack this week for not saying so. The BBC does report, however, that the US and Britain have classified Hamas as a ‘terrorist organisation.’ But nearly everyone reporting in the media, including the BBC, agrees that the acts of the weekend of 7 October that were committed by Hamas were terrorist acts. This begs the question: Can you commit terrorist acts and not be a terrorist?

Of course, you can if you are a government at war. We have seen this most recently with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Just this week, the United Nations published the findings of its investigation into Russian aggression in Ukraine showing that ‘Russian authorities have committed the war crimes of wilful killing, torture, rape and other sexual violence and the deportation of children to the Russian Federation.’ The same atrocities committed by a non-governmental body would be referred to as terrorism.

Writing in Prospect this week, Conor Gearty, an expert in human rights law, takes the position that Hamas is ‘too governmental’ to be called a terrorist group. Gearty explains:

‘Hamas are not, however, a straightforward terrorist group, senselessly violent though these attacks may have been. They won the most recent election held across Palestine, in 2006, and have been in control of Gaza since 2007. Hamas may be called a terrorist group but if so, they are a very governmental sort of terrorist. This authority in Gaza gives them more options than mere violence, and though Israel and its supporters may wish it to be so, their violence does not appear (in the past at least) to have destroyed their wider support in the community. Here they more resemble Hezbollah, Haganah (from Israel’s own “terrorist” past), the South African ANC and the IRA than they do al-Qaeda or the Red Army Faction from 1970s Germany.’

Others agree that Hamas should not be called terrorists, but for a different reason altogether. Referring to Hamas as terrorists can be viewed as anti-muslim (my spell check has this as anti-muslimism). In so many contexts, the word terrorist has been weaponised.

Plenty of people would object to these opinions, saying to not call Hamas a terrorist organisation is antisemitic. I found examples of this in the comments to Gearty’s article. Taking a different stance outside of religion, I’ve heard politicians and pundits in recent days arguing that calling Hamas terrorists is a way of distinguishing Hamas from the innocent Palestinians caught in the crossfire or deliberately being used as human shields.

Pointing out differences in the uses of words and their connotations isn’t just an academic exercise. Words matter. I appreciate that the BBC is trying to show its objectivity in reporting these events, but this is near impossible given the long history of wars and talk of genocide and hate coming from all corners.

I’m afraid that in the weeks and months ahead, atrocities are going to be committed on both sides of this conflict whether they are called terrorism or war crimes.

The controversial and horrific air attack on a hospital in Gaza.

Indian Summers

As a child, I always looked forward to the Indian Summer edition of the Chicago Tribune. I don’t know what there was to look forward to as the pictures and the accompanying story was the same every year. This was cartoonist John T. McCutcheon’s ‘Injun Summer.’ Due to the use of the politically incorrect words Injun and redskin for Indian, this autumnal delight has disappeared from papers across America. Which is a shame – even as a child I knew Injun was an old dialect word or mispronunciation of Indian and that redskin was a despicable word of its time. Neither term was meant in a derogatory or malicious way in the story.

Before I get to the main point of this week’s blog, allow me a short walk down memory lane. McCutcheon’s story was first written in 1907 and harkened back to the author’s childhood in the 1870s. It features a grandfather, who speaks in a folksy Mark Twain style, with his grandson looking across an autumnal field of corn stacks. The grandfather explains the meaning of Indian Summer by playing into the child’s imagination, envisioning the corn stacks as tepees and calling up the spirits of the Indians that once lived there.

Some etymological truth underlies McCutcheon’s story. The spell of warm temperatures interrupting the autumn cooling towards winter have loose links to Native American lands. The first recorded use of Indian Summer goes back to an essay written in French in 1788, indicating that it was already used in spoken language in North America. Some speculate that the origins of the term came from the unseasonably warm conditions in autumn that were noted by Europeans in regions inhabited by Native Americans (even though it occurs throughout the Western Hemisphere). Another idea is that the term referred to a time of year when American Indians hunted.

Back to the present. This year we have experienced two Indian Summers with a heatwave – hotter than the average summer – in mid-September and a more traditional warming up of autumnal temperatures in early October. This time, I’m not feeling sentimental about these experiences or nostalgic for the Chicago Tribune of my childhood. A confused lone red damselfly has been hovering around our back garden for days. The front of the house has marigolds blooming and budding as they would in August. Two Indian Summers, with the extreme heat of first, are unsettling.

During our second Indian Summer, I was reading the latest New York Times Climate Newsletter. David Gelles reported on the increase in fossil fuel production with hundreds of new gas and oil projects having been approved in the past year. Gelles relates this to what we have all been hearing but needs to be said yet again:

‘There will be grave implications for the planet, which has already warmed by about 1.2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. This year is shaping up to be the hottest on record, with record heat on land and the ocean fuelling extreme weather around the world.’

Writing about the dangers of pollution, Rachel Carson famously described a Silent Spring. I wonder if Indian Summers with their unseasonal insects and flowers are becoming Autumnal Augury.

A print-only newspaper misses the point

County Highway is a new American newspaper with a retro-19th century look that is only available in paper copy and is determined to never go online. Like papers of times gone by, it’s a broadsheet with six tightly packed small-print columns across a page. Just the thought of it makes my eyes ache.

The editors describe their ethos:

‘Some of us fear the spectre of an incipient totalitarianism emerging from our laptops and iPhones. Some of us are simply allergic to conformity and brand-names. What we share in common is a revulsion at the smugness, sterility, and shitty aesthetics of the culture being forced upon us by monopoly tech platforms and corporate media, and a desire to make something better. We encourage you to think of our publication as a kind of hand-made alternative to the undifferentiated blob of electronic “content” that you scroll through every morning, most of which is produced by robots.’

This quote comes from their website, the same website where I found links to their Instagram and X/Twitter accounts.

Contradictions aside, I appreciate the spirit of this. It’s true that a lot of online content follows trends, is highly commercialised and is controlled by a handful of tech giants. But this is not a new phenomenon brought on by the internet or digital technology. Not too long ago, television was run by a few large companies and the government. These channels were and many still are beholden to advertisers or to the government of the day. Words like ‘smugness, sterility, and shitty aesthetics’ could easily apply to the box. Online news and social media are just another version of this with the added advantages of interactivity and citizens’ journalism – though some would say these are the worst features on online news. Discuss.

Most of my news comes from reading my phone or laptop. I tend to go directly to news outlets, and I particularly like the moving images from embedded video clips. I also listen to news on radio, podcasts and television. While I don’t have any hankering for thin inky pages, in the UK my Sunday mornings wouldn’t be right without the paper version of The Observer. In France, it’s the Saturday edition of Le Monde. These traditions today involve having the phone on at the same time – checking sources, looking up the odd word and adding reviewed books to my Amazon Wishlist. I accept that we live in a time where paper and screen co-exist.

Furthermore, County Highway, do you really think most digital news content is produced by robots? AI might be able to produce passable news copy, but only from texts written by humans through the conduits of human experience.

My final criticism – why harken back to the style of news from two centuries ago? Aside from being difficult on the eyes, it was colourless and rarely had photos. I suspect nostalgia is at work here. To quote Milan Kundera ‘The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So, nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.’

SNA – Some New Abbreviations?

Abbreviations are nothing new. They’re found in Ancient Greek, Latin and medieval writings. According to the New York Times, the earliest known abbreviation in printed English is from an 1844 article: SPQR, for the Latin Senatus Populusque Romanus (The Senate and the People of Rome). This quasi-initialism appeared in The Christian’s Monthly Magazine and Universal Review that could have called itself the CMMUR.

What got me thinking about abbreviations was the announcement this week from The Merriam-Webster English Dictionary that they have added 690 new words since the start of the year. I haven’t read through the full list – I do have a life. From those I have seen, a large number are initialisms and acronyms, which MWED (sorry, couldn’t resist) lump together under the label ‘abbreviations.’ Okay, I’ll play along.

Quite a few of these abbreviations have their likely origins in text messaging (SMS- it’s inescapable) and social media, where speed is of the essence and character numbers are sometimes restricted. A few examples with MWED’s definitions:

ngl abbreviation, informal not gonna lie; not going to lie.

TFW abbreviation, informal that feeling when – used especially on social media or in text messages to introduce a relatable scenario or an image that evokes a specific feeling.

TTYL abbreviation, informal talk to you later.

I’m assuming some of these are lower case while others are uppercase because that’s how they’re being used. Seeing the MWED using gonna is novel and destroys my writing teacher’s mantra about not writing exactly how you speak.

Then there’s GOATED – apparently all caps. It started its slang life as GOAT – the greatest of all time. I’ve seen this pop up on social media, which tells me it’s not just a young person’s expression given the grown-ups I follow online. The word has now acquired an adjective form to denote ‘something or someone who is considered to be the greatest of all time.’ Though linguistically interesting, I find this rather cringeworthy, reminding me of the hyperbolic language spouted by populists.

Other abbreviations on the new word list come from official channels, such as the US government, who have replaced UFOs with UAPs. Here’s MWED’s wordy definition:

unidentified aerial phenomenon (a mysterious flying object in the sky that is sometimes assumed to be a spaceship from another planet); also: unidentified anomalous phenomenon (a mysterious phenomenon, especially an unidentified aerial phenomenon, that is sometimes assumed to be a spaceship from another planet).

I suspect this is an exercise in rebranding, intended to give an air of legitimacy to government-led investigations into what I still call UFOs.

Once again, the addition of words to our dictionaries reflects the age we live in. More on this topic later, I’m sure.

Adieu Carras, Nice

Aside from the odd immoveable rawlplug, the walls are bare. The cardboard boxes, stacked unevenly like a toddler’s set of blocks, wait for the movers to take them away. After nearly 14 years, I’m saying goodbye to our Nice apartment in the neighbourhood of Carras. But I’m not saying goodbye to all of Nice as we’ll be just up the coast in Menton. I’m imagining regular trips, about 35 minutes by train, to visit friends, go to museums and have boozy lunches with the Nice chapter of the Society of Authors.

So long, Carras. What will I remember of you? The busy streets bustle with cars, motorbikes and a menagerie of people, walking and talking, children skipping. The sea breeze shifts the exhaust smells, blending them with fragrances from the bakery, the pizza bar and the patisseries.

This part of the Promenade des Anglais will stay with me too. Unlike central Nice, replete with tourists and often supporters of football teams (as the city hosts international matches and championships), Carras beach is about local people. Women in abayas and burkinis can be found meters away from the topless French and Italian sunworshippers.

While I won’t miss this little apartment, I will miss the idea that for so long it was a place friends and family could stay. As I’m not a name dropper, I’ll just say that the apartment has been a creative getaway for writers and artists. I suspect I’ll feel this sense of connection with those who stayed here for years to come even if we have lost contact.

I wrote last week about a sense of place in literature. Now I’m thinking about a sense of place in one’s life. Carras has been a place in the background perhaps because it’s been a second home and the scenery to my learning about living in France. Carras has been there but hasn’t defined me or shaped my identity – an acquaintance as opposed to a friend to which I whisper a simple adieu.