After re-reading my last blog post, I've been considering getting into scriptwriting. What a drama queen! It ended on quite a cliff-hanger, too! I really had no idea how things were going to turn out though. All I knew was that England was NOT part of my year-long travel plan! Nor, for that matter, was having surgery to remove a freaky dermoid cyst (seriously freaky - check out these Google images, if you dare....but not while you're eating). And my only option was to accept it.

I accepted it for about a month before packing my bags again.

Still being on my career break, I'd had time to catch up with a lot of people in England. Funny, because I don't remember Michael Aspel greeting me upon my return to the UK, handing over the big red book and telling me This is Your Life! Actually, it was very nice seeing faces I didn't think I'd see again for some time. But four weeks on, the novelty of being back in familiar surroundings was wearing off, and having successfully begun the oh-so-long process of being referred for an operation under the NHS, there was only one thing to do: travel! Well, until the next appointment anyway.

I like to buy one-way tickets where possible, but let's not get bogged down in the psychology of that - suffice to say, I prefer to do a loop if I'm going to come back to where I started, rather than go backwards. So I conjured up a nice little journey which would, over two weeks, take me on a train from Leeds to Poole (to see my Granny Dink), on a ferry from Poole to Brittany (to see Jean, a chap about whom you will hear more shortly), on a plane from Brittany to London (to see the one and only Becca - my best friend while in South Africa), and on a coach from London back to Leeds.

Another week or so passed with me back up north, and as the baby/house/husband-sitting requests increased, I sensed that my presence had become the norm once again. Of course I'd take their kids to the park, watch cartoons and eat Tesco Value pizzas with them - with pleasure! But I needed another plan, too, to take me up to my next appointment. And then my Mum told me she and her husband were going to Paris. Hmmmm... France again... But Paris IS always a good idea, as my friend Lilley says...

I arrived the day after Mum and Nick left and quickly settled myself into the small apartment I'd hired through Airbnb. I won't lie; I did pretend I lived there, although I think the legendary TV character, Boycie, might have had more chance of convincing my neighbours he was a local than I did. Regardless, I spent five glorious mornings at nearby Mysore Yoga Paris (a beautiful shala with an excellent teacher called Kia Naddermier ***** Girl crush alert! *****), practised my French each day using a natty little app called Duo Lingo, visited art exhibitions, and sat in cafés writing in my journal (looking mysterious and chic, I'm sure). Pleasingly, I got a visit on the penultimate night, from a certain Frenchman, too.

I got back to England on March 27th in time for my long-awaited pre-op assessment. It was during that appointment that I found out what I'd wanted to know all along - when the op will be. A girl can't live in limbo (or England!) forever, you know. I still don't have the actual answer, but I do know it will most likely be July before they can even give me a date for it, due to them having a big backlog of patients to attend to, and my case not being considered as urgent as I'd originally been told it was. With no time to dwell on what-ifs (eg. what if I'd just kept on travelling and dealt with it all when I was meant to get back, in July?), I promptly booked my next flight to France - one-way, naturally. One month later, I'm still here.

And that is What Katy Did Next. Or Qu'est-ce Katy a fait après, as I recently learnt. She saw much-missed family and friends, spent more time in parks than is healthy for a grown up without children, and crossed the English Channel three times. But more on all that in my next post (which will come very soon, by the way, since I write this from my sickbed, as I try to rid myself of a nasty bout of tonsillitis, before heading to Thailand!). Oh these cliff-hangers just write themselves...