This is Rouen, signing off...

Well, there's no getting round it. It's time to put away my beret and baguette, and dust down the old bowler hat and brolly – I'm moving back to England. Actually, I hope to be dumping clichés like that over the side of the boat, but something tells me I won't escape them, wherever I go.

This will be my last post for a while. As is always the case, despite all efforts to avoid it, I'm sure to be cut off from the internet for weeks. But I have decided to try and embrace this spell of analogue life and do things like write postcards and throw pebbles in the sea. Who needs the internet anyway? I've managed to blog once a week during this complicated move, so I hope to do more once the dust has settled. In the meantime, it's the Eighteenth Century for me.

It's very strange to leave a whole life behind, a whole way of life, not to mention another language (bien que je n'aie jamais blogué en français). So many lovely people, so much that's familiar, exchanged for a new town in a country that has changed a lot in the seven years I've been away. But I won't bore you with my strange emotional state. And I have things to look forward to as well, such as the arrival of a certain contract (fingers crossed! fingers crossed!), not to mention the ability to actually say yes to publishing parties. Also, the pub.

So this is me, signing off for a bit. But it's not adieu (unless those clichés capsize the ferry) merely au revoir. Have a great summer and see you soon.