Today was our last day in Paris and this evening has been – understandably – a little fraught, with the packing and calculations of how long it will take to get to Gare du Nord tomorrow and so on. I’m also feeling rather frazzled at the prospect of tomorrow as a whole – getting the flat all cleaned and tidied and parents out to get to the Eurostar, then getting us all home from St Pancras, and then finally the most stressful thing of all – getting us out of the house again to go to the premiere of my new piece Deconstruct: Point, line, plane. I don’t know that any of my other premieres have ever had me so worried as this one. I know I’ve built this piece exactly how I wanted it to be. I’m confident that it can work, but the criticism I received about it when it was still in its embryonic state just makes me doubt just a little bit, even while I know that it didn’t want to be anything other than what it is. And then there’s the question if whether the performers have just decided to change it… And if they have, is it still under my name or have they correctly listed it as an arrangement. I tell you, the sooner Wednesday rocks up, the happier I’ll be!

But we’ve had a lovely last day in Paris. Ran some errands, and my Da finally took me to Shakespeare and Company – and what a gorgeous bookshop it is!!! Most of the books upstairs aren’t for selling – they’re for sitting about and reading! And they’ve got a piano up there, waiting to be played, so we were all happy – the Da nosing around the poetry section, me reading snippets of Julia Child on French bread, the mama playing Debussy on the piano (and drawing quite a happy crowd: Mama: ‘It’s just you there, isn’t it?’ Me: ‘No, but they’re not listening, they’re all reading books, aren’t you?’ Small throng: *assorted giggles*).

And then we visited Notre Dame. And for the first time I noticed the lovely chapel and column paintings – don’t know how I missed them before – so clean and clear. Really gorgeous.

I should stop procrastinating with photos and ‘fess up though that I’ve done precious little Creative Pact work today – I really think I’m reaching the end of what I can do on the iPad for this project. It’s been great and really useful, and I’m VERY glad I didn’t bring the laptop (especially now I’m on the verge of having to lug lots of lovely foodie shopping back to Blighty) but I really need to be working in PHP now, which means I need my books and a server and an Internet connection I don’t need to reset every 30 seconds. Um… On second thoughts, I guess that’s not so much an iPad limitation as a limitation of circumstances, due to not having packed the PHP book and only having rubbish Internet. But still, feeling a little hamstrung and like I’m treading water. I have managed to achieve a tiny bit, but it was only setting up template pages for the contact page (will contain a PHP form) and a page to hold the Tate’s video interview with me, which I can’t tell if I can embed because Vimeo just tells me it’s Flash, which obv won’t work on the iPad – going to have to wait till I get home to see if that should even have a separate page at all or just a link to Vimeo (suspect the latter, which means I’ll need to work out the best styling for putting about a paragraph of text into the right column and making it all look nice). So not a complete fail there, but a bit wussy, really. Still, planning in being at home and working in it for pretty much the whole of Wednesday and Thursday, so I think I’m still in with a chance to get it ready to fly on the 30th…