There’s a small but remarkably significant moment in one of my favourite novels, “Misterioso” by Alan Plater. One day, Rachel travels from Hull to London, and when she gets to her hotel that afternoon, she has a nap.

That’s it.

But she wakes up in the evening and I think you eventually realise that this is the moment her life changes. For what she’s actually done is flip day for night: she spends that night at a jazz club, being driven back to her hotel only the next morning. In Alan’s television dramatisation of his novel, there’s this exchange I’ve always liked a lot:

RACHEL: That pink stuff in the sky. Is that dawn?
PAUL: Yes. You’ve never seen one before?
RACHEL: Not in living memory.
PAUL: I’ll drive a bit closer to it.

For the rest of the week she spends in London, Rachel is now a night person. Instantly changed from a daytime travel agent worker into a nighttime jazz club attendee and then waitress. It’s also who she is meant to be. You come to think that this is the real Rachel.

Last Saturday, I went to Paris and having done my usual thing of working every second possible up to then, I was knackered. Mid-afternoon, I get to my hotel, kick off my shoes, and I sleep deeply and soundly, interrupted only by thoughts of this novel.

It’s not like I woke up having become a Parisian. (I first wrote “It’s not like I woke up a Parisan”, but that sounds like there was someone else there from Paris.) But I did wake up with a series of things to do and no requirement to do any of them, no requirement to do anything at any time. This was meant to be a working trip, it was a self-assembly writing retreat, in which I intended to get a particular project written and also obviously see some more of Paris.

I did all of that. Wrote a lot, finished the project, had dinner at Le Pure Café from “Before Sunset”, which is one of my top-one films. Had a great time and felt changed by it.

Only, there is something else in “Misterioso”. It took me a long time to register just how fast that day/night flip goes for Rachel, but ever since I first read the book back in the 1980s, there’s been an element that has stuck with me. And stuck with me quite worriedly.

Rachel goes back to Hull. She goes back to her life there and it’s like the life is the wrong size now. What particularly sticks with me is how she is treated by her boyfriend Will and while he’s welcoming her home, he’s cooked her favourite meal, he’s interested in what she has to tell him, it’s all also just wrong. It rankles and we know it immediately. From the novel:

Will was at the barrier to meet her. He took her case, and the flowers, then contrived a kiss and a hampered hug. “I’ve missed you,” he said. According to all the scripts, she should have said: “I missed you, too” but what she said was: “Thank you.”

The problem is that he thinks he knows her and Rachel has come to realise that she didn’t know herself. So much has changed for her, and here he is, “certain that he knew her”. For all that he is a sweet guy and a very dear friend, she is no longer who he is so certain she is and what he thinks is a great welcome home is totally wrong because to her this doesn’t even seem like home anymore.

The short version for me is that his certainty makes the situation, and him, boring.

While I was away in Paris, my wife Angela was away with her sister. As I write this, she’s coming back later today and I so badly don’t want coming home to be boring for her.