Two-timer

For ten years I enjoyed lecturing on post-war French politics and culture, while publishing on some of the themes fictionalised in the novel. But universities are unsettling places for those allergic to top-heavy management. With a British passport in my pocket, all too familiar with league tables, galled by Blair sleepwalking into the Iraq war, I experienced the oscillations, often mundane, at times dramatic, familiar to immigrants tagged by competing cultures, each demanding loyalty.

Auspiciously, after years spent fantasising about vacant stone houses in southern France, a second home cropped up in the Languedoc, which we promptly bought with friends. Opting for early retirement, my life filled with grace once again. I became a two-timer, flirting with France and England, in turn irritated or seduced by one or the other, not wanting to live under Sarkozy or Brown.