I imagined us in a flat in a European city, it didn’t matter which one, so long as the language outside was not English, the murmur of an incomprehensible tongue surrounding us like a curtain of privacy. It would be my flat, with open shelves and a big slop sink and cut-up fruit lying on a wooden slab on the counter.
I really detest this trope of treating Europe as though it exists as a tourist destination or fetishising it as some kind of romantic utopia, in which the locals are useful as backdrop. What would you be doing, buying a flat somewhere and being so resistant to learning the country’s language that the incomprehensibility of it to you is a positive selling point?
I know it’s a fantasy, but still.
