Mais oui & nhưng tất nhiên

Remember I said I was feeling very lucky indeed last post? Well I continue to feel giddily and enormously grateful for all the Good Things that have come to me this year. 

Last year wasn’t bad either though - remember this time last year I ran away to join the jockeys at the Sultan of Oman’s Chateau in Paris? I ate cake and wandered the beautiful city streets and declared I would one day have the chic wardrobe and jutting collarbone of a true Parisian? Well, that didn’t happen…something better did…Tony Hogan is going to be published in 2013 in France by the wonderful Editions Philippe Rey. The publish one of my all time favourites Joyce Carol Oates. I am absolutely cock-a-hoop.

AND this is as good a time as any to say in five weeks I am journeying back to my beloved Vietnam to be a writer proper for about six months. I’ve not been since I wrote Tony Hogan there, rode bicycles and battled cockroaches, fell in love with everything inside the long thin country’s borders and gorged my body weight in Bun Cha and drip-coffee. I wrote a wee story about that here. This time I’m going to: read, write, ride bicycles and battle cockroaches, fall in love anew and gorge myself on bun-cha, drip coffee and the heady delights of Hanoi. 

See? I’m fucking lucky and very grateful indeed for every bit of it.