Greetings from the Year Abroad I am now conducting from my bedroom: a year abroad insofar that it is no longer a Year, but a strange, shapeless vortex of timey wimey stuff, and abroad in the sense that it’s not abroad, but is in fact a suburb in North Yorkshire. What have I been doing, […]
Author Archives: floracbowen
Questions of travel, by Elizabeth Bishop
Since we’ve all been temporarily prevented from travelling further than ‘another government-mandated walk around the block? Well, it’s not as if I’ve got much else on…’ , I thought this would be quite a useful poem to think about. It plays with the excitement of travelling, at the same time as it questions its necessity, […]
We escape lockdown corona crisis in France
And so we enter the event I am calling ‘The Second Fucking Time I’ve Had To Flee A Country On The Year Abroad.’ (TSFTIHTFACOTYA for short?). It’s all happened pretty quickly. On Friday I sent an e-mail to the company I was supposed to work for in Beaune, in which I (oh, innocence) wondered whether […]
Corona-vacances : she may be small, but she’s shut down France
You’ve probably noticed by now how it’s all gone a bit Exodus, that the newspapers have become great harbingers of doom, and that the world’s generally on an off-day. Coronavirus (for it is she) has spread to France, which is now the 2nd most infected country in Europe, and the ENS has closed. Plus no […]
The Offing, a review.
(The following was commissioned and accepted by the Literary Review for the August 2019 issue, however was not published.) Robert Appleyard is an unusual protagonist for a contemporary novel. The sixteen-year-old son of a miner, he treks across the Yorkshire moors to Robin Hood’s Bay one sunny summer not long after the Second World War. […]
My CV
Flora Bowen University of Cambridge Education Oct 2017- June 2021 Currently working towards a BA (Hons) in Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Cambridge. January- May 2020 Erasmus exchange at the Ecole Normale Superieure Lyon, one of France’s prestigious ‘Grandes Écoles’. September 2010 – 2017 Bootham School, York A-Level French, Spanish, History, English […]
The holidays, and halfway through.
(n.b. I wrote this while I was quite tired, so some of it might sound like I was smoking something fruity. I wasn’t.) For Part 1 at Cambridge, we studied the nouvelle vague classic, Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7h. This film, which follows Cléo through her day, represents time as an elastic quantity, […]
Visiting Romans in Vienne
When in Gaul, do as the Gauls do. Something like that. Last weekend we found an opportunity to prance around like it was 47BC, in the little town of Vienne. After some confusion over where we were meeting, how to get from the ENS to the station, then how to get from the metro to […]
A day in Grenoble
I decided to go to the Alps. Although I have been in Lyon for just over a month, my life here so far has been steadily horizontal – far from the breathless climbs that pushed through every day in La Paz. Skiing was pretty much out of the question; despite my parents paying for private […]
Belgium: Brussels, Ghent, Courtai.
There are several reasons for visiting Belgium. Mine fall into two categories: Food (see – frites, moules, waffles) and Nice Old Things. This time, however, a third motivation presented itself: Following my Boyfriend Around Cities While he Makes Notes on 19th Century Statues for Some ‘Interesting’ Historical Project. Plus waffles. For attractions which elude me, […]
