I was going to build to this but it’s you, I’ll just go there. Recently I went to Paris, bought a pack of ten metro tickets online, and I’ve still got six left. Consequently I have decided it would be a terrible waste of about 12 euros if I don’t go back to use them up.

In a few weeks’ time, I will. I’m going to Paris on my first-ever writing retreat, the first despite a very long time now of being a writer. 

For reasons passing understanding, I mentioned that I was considering doing something like this, I mentioned it in an online chat and I think I even said it on 58keys, my YouTube channel. Wherever I said it, two things happened. One was that I got a Buy Me a Coffee donation expressly to be spent making the retreat happen, which was startlingly fantastic. And the other was that I was told by a friend that he’d been on a writing retreat where he was the sole person who wrote while every single other person — and every other married person too — spent the entire time in what he described as a hurricane of sex.

So I’ve decided I need a writing retreat. 

But rather than go on some organised one and, you know, maybe learn anything, instead I really have booked a hotel in Paris. First I’d thought I’d just stay at home, switch my phone to stun, and write away in my office. Then I figured no, I’d go to Bath instead and have a fanboy’s great time going around places Jane Austen has written about. Then I considered London, too.

And there’s a writer I so nearly ended up working with that on emailing to say it was a shame that project didn’t turn out, I offered to buy him lunch some time. I’ve nothing to tell you, I said, and nothing to ask, which turned out to be handy because he hasn’t replied.

Possibly I shouldn’t have told him about the hurricane of sex.

Anyway. I considered Edinburgh. It’s a fine city. Cardiff is great. I mean, Cardiff Bay and that beautiful Millennium Centre, fantastic.

But I spotted a connection here and realised that I was looking at cities because I need cities. I realised I was looking for anywhere other than the city I live in, because this much is certain: if I stayed in or even near Birmingham, then the smallest breeze would send me right back to my office.

Instead, I’m going to be alone in the 19th Arrondissement of Paris and I’m going to visit the cafe from “Before Sunset”, but otherwise I will be writing and writing and writing.

It’s an indulgence, and spending a lot of money to not waste 12 euros is possibly questionable. But when this comes up in a few weeks’ time, it will be after an extra-busy time, and it will be right before another extra-busy time.

I’d ask if you want to come with me, but that suddenly seems awkward.