Just now, it's OK to be American in Paris

The surrealness of it struck me yesterday at Bon Marché. The man at the exchange counter, usually so surly, asked me my nationality. I got ready to do the usual: bowing my head with shame and whispering so no one could hear: "Americaine".

Then it hit me. I no longer had to feel ashamed! Barack Obama had liberated me and my fellow expats from a lifetime of humiliation. "I'm American!" I practically shouted, loud enough for the Japanese at the next desk to look up and grin.

In the 25 years I have lived overseas I have gone through myriad ruses to hide my nationality, ever since I saw my first anti-American demo in Oxford Street in 1982. Then, I was so green I could not understand why anyone could hate the land where the buffalo roamed. After about three years in England, I was marching too - against Ronald Reagan, against the wars in Central America, against Bush Senior and finally Bush Junior. I developed elaborate excuses about my origins: Italian father, British nationality, and so on.

But after Barack, it's different. The day of the elections, I received this email from a French friend: "To my American friends, this won't happen often, so savour it. Here is a high five to your great country from a Frenchman." Another French friend wrote: "You guys make huge mistakes but when you do it right, you really do it. Congratulations!"

The man in the tabac today called me "cherie" after he realised I was from the US. At my son's school, one of the more obnoxious fathers was sporting an Obama T-shirt (and he's not even American). French mums are wearing star-spangled banner scarves and French designer Catherine Malandrino has designed a stars-and-stripes silk dress.

It reminds me of another brief time when everyone wanted to be American in Paris. In the classic 1959 Godard film Breathless, the gangster, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, falls in love with the gamine Jean Seberg, an American girl who carries the Herald Tribune in one hand and betrays him with the other. How beloved America was at that time, the era when JFK brought Jackie to Paris.

But I know it won't last. As a French friend warned me: "At last, we forgive you for the Bush years. You're our friend now. But be careful. We have very short memories."