I just got a retweet from the Prime Minister (I suspect it was actually one of his flunkies as he’s probably quite busy most days) asking me for Facebook feedback on the government. Specifically, what had I actually wanted after the last election.

By the time I got around to voting, 1,107,003 other people had already cast their click, and look at the results so far:

So, 24% of people are happy with what we got, but more people than that wanted another election.

Which leaves us with one question: with the coalition still banging on about inclusive politics and consulting us on what we want, isn’t it time it called another election?

Has it really come to this? They’ll cover-mount anything these days for a quick sale.

It’s years since I’d last been and since then they’ve smartened up Centre Court with a big noisy roof to keep the sun off the royal box let them keep playing through the rain.

So, no need for those pads you can buy to soften the seats any more, but plenty of need for rules explanations from PC Pro Tim who was on hand to keep me on track.

So, we watched Federer batting for Switzerland and Lleyton Hewitt pitching for Australia. Both won, despite the heat and stickiness. Very impressive games, particularly once you understand the rules.

Much unpleasantness getting there and back on account of the weather. Don’t get me wrong: I love the sun and the warmth but when you have to put on longs for the first time in weeks your legs find themselves somewhat shocked.

I picked up this one for inspiration. I’d read that it was the book to read if you want to know how to write a travelogue. I can see why.

Check this paragraph:

The Galician night came quickly, the hills turned purple and the valleys flooded with heavy shadow. The jagged coastline below, now dark and glittering, looked like sweepings of broken glass. Vigo was cold and dim, an unlighted ruin, already smothered in the dead blue dusk. Only the sky and the ocean stayed alive, running with immense streams of flame. Then as the sun went down it seemed to drag the whole sky with it like the shreds of a burning curtain, leaving rags of bright water that went on smoking and smouldering along the estuaries and around the many islands. I saw the small white ship, my last link with home, flare like a taper and die away in the darkness; then I was alone at last, sitting on a hilltop, my teeth chattering as the night wind rose.

I would be delighted to write something as descriptive as that while sitting on the hillside as the sun went down, but this book was written in 1969, 35 years after the journey took place. That’s quite an impressive memory.

The violence of the heat seemed to bruise the whole earth and turn its crust into one huge scar. One’s blood dried up and all juices vanished; the sun struck upwards, sideways, and down, while the wheat went buckling across the fields like a solid sheet of copper. I kept on walking because there was no shade to hide in, and because it seemed to be the only way to agitate the air around me. I began to forget what I was doing on the road at all; I walked on as though keeping a vow, till I was conscious only of the hot red dust grinding like pepper between my toes.

The story, such as it is, isn’t a racer, but the descriptions paint a more vivid picture than any album stuffed full of photos. The skill in the writing is the way in which Lee manages to get away with drenching his prose in quite so many similes and metaphors without weighing it down or leaving it feeling overworked.

A great piece of armchair travel, it chronicles Lee’s two year journey through a largely unexplored country. Malaga, Marbella and Fuengirola are small fishing ports, not high-rise resorts, and as the story runs on we start to hear the first rumblings of war: civil war. It’s this momentous evolution that ultimately gives the story its satisfying pay-off, and runs it perfectly into George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.

I guess this means we’ll be washing our own mugs.

The Moulin Rouge

Paris looks its best at night. The city is beautiful anyway, but when the sky is dark and the best of its buildings are lit up they really come into their own.

We left Lyon on a late morning train that got us back to the capital in time for lunch overlooking the Seine, a walk down to the Statue of Liberty and then the metro out to the Bois de Boulogne. Not been there in ages, but I do remember the shady ladies hanging around in the trees as they tout for business. I’m quite glad we were on Velibs which means we could ride away faster than they could totter in their impossibly high heels.

I say ‘quite glad’ because it wasn’t an entirely good experience hiring bikes. In principle it’s a great idea. There are bike stations all over the city so you can check one out at the start of your trip and then check it back in somewhere else when you’re done. The bikes are easy to ride and well maintained, but the actual check in/out system is a seriously convoluted process.

Or perhaps the translations were just a bit off.

Either way it took us ages to get Rich’s bike logged back into the system and even with mine we had to log out and then back in again to be sure, so I don’t think we’d do that again.

We were glad to be rid of them by the time we were done, and jumped on a metro back into the centre for dinner.

Pyramid at the Louvre

Neither of us was particularly hungry after a week of good food, but we headed back into the Latin Quarter for a cheap menu and found a little restaurant where they had cats roaming around under the tables then shot off with our cameras as soon as we had paid for one last walk around the city.

Up past Notre Dame, pass by the Pompidou Centre, down to the Louvre to squat down by the pools as everyone else lay on their edges and looked up at the stars, and then home by way of Montmarte, which seemed to have turned off its lights, so no photo opportunities up there.

Notre Dame

All very touristy.

Saturday – today – a walk through the flea markets and lunch and a train home. A bit of a shocking return to reality. After quiet, comfy TGVs we were back on the Eurostar with badly behaved British children running up and down the aisles, British parents leaving over the backs of their seats to talk to each other and a woman with a very flimsy grasp of French translating her paper’s obituaries into English.

Would rather be back in Lyon.

Pompidou Centre

Last time I was in Lyon was 2003. We were chasing some lost train tickets and only discovered the best bits – the proper old town – a day before leaving. This time, forewarned and forearmed, that’s where we spent a lot of our time.

We walked and walked and walked, which is probably harder to do in Lyon than it is in Paris because it’s so much more hilly. You have the silk district – Croix Rousse – and the hill up to Fourviere and the huge church (accurately described as a dead elephant with its legs up in the air), each of which require some hefty calf work.

So anyway, we arrived on Tuesday after the kind of train journey you’d never get at home. Comfortable seats, quiet carriages, perfectly behaved kids, a service that runs according to some kind of timetable… it was almost a shame to arrive. Particularly as the areas around Lyon’s stations are so dumpy.

Anyhow, we checked into our room and went exploring. Who would have known that Lyon would be such a catch for Art Deco buildings. I remembered the old Pathe cinema, of course, but look at this friendly building.

Oh, hai!

That sits out at the end of the little skyscraper district on the Part Dieu side of the river where you can live in great looking buildings like this:

Art Deco architecture, Lyon

And in the evenings you can take the metro into town and watch a film at this great-looking cinema, complete with a golden crowing cockerel on the top of its tower:

Pathe cinema, Lyon

We didn’t do that, of course. We were too busy walking and eating. Lyon is rightly famous for its gastronomy and we had some excellent meals, but it’s pretty lame if you’re a proper vegetarian. I ate fish twice a day every day. Not that that was a problem as it was universally excellent. We ate lunches outside in the sun on the huge Place Bellecour, and dinners outside in the old town on wobbly little tables perched precariously on the street cobbles.

We did give in to our aching feet once – when we took the funicular up the hill to the basilica. You can’t help but notice this enormous white building as it dominates the skyline, looking down on the city and the river. It’s a cool refuge from the sun at the height of the day, and right by the Roman ruins, which have stood over the city for a couple of thousand years and are in surprisingly good condition. Particularly when you consider they’re free to enter and you can clamber all over them (although you do get shouted at if you climb up anything properly perpendicular).

Traboule courtyard, Lyon

Highlights of Lyon? Rather shamefully it was probably the food, which I didn’t think I’d say as we trained out to Les Halles, which is supposed to show off the city’s culinary delights but fell short of the same in Nimes.

Still, pike souffle can do a lot to win you over. Particularly when it’s followed by Terrine de Pain Perdu Brioche – effectively a very naughty, rich, sticky bread pudding made with brioche. I need to find out how you make it.

The Arc du Triomphe, seen from La Defense

Last year was the first in about 15 that I didn’t make it to Paris, so it was good to get back – even if it was just for a few days either side of heading down to Lyon.

We had initially been planning on a trip to the ballet. Dad’s suggestion on account of the fact that there was something he wanted to see and we had never been, so he came up by train from the south and we did the same from the north via the tunnel and we met in the middle.

Without any ballet tickets.

Turns out it’s incredibly difficult to get your hands on any as there are all sorts of restrictions on who can buy what and when. There is even one day in the booking cycle when it is only open to foreigners and non Paris residents which strikes me as a bit unfair.

Opera Garnier where we would have, but didn’t, see the ballet

Rather unfortunately it coincided with Eurovision. I hadn’t realised this when I booked the train – stupidly – so our first job on arriving on Saturday evening was to find our hotel, dump our bags and then race to the Marais, which seemed the most likely place to find anywhere showing it.

But you know what? It turns out French bars aren’t all that hot on Eurovision. We found two showing it, but only one had the sound turned on. The other was showing the pictures on a telly in the corner with boppy music over the top.

Anyhow, we holed up in the one bar that was showing both halves of the programme and gently sweated through two and a bit hours of songs before hot-footing it back to the hotel for the voting.

Watching is back we didn’t miss much on the interval act although we would like to have heard the UK commentary as it became more and more abundantly clear that we were heading for last place again. Can’t say I’m entirely surprised: the performance was fine but the song didn’t really grab me the way it did Rich.

I wish I understood more of what the commentators were saying as they got very giggly at the national judges giving their scores.

Rooftops of Paris

Anyhow, we met dad the next morning and spent the next couple of days with him, eating cheap meals on the Rue Mouffetard (Bistrot Gourmand, since you ask – €9 for three courses) and training it out to La Defense, which Rich hadn’t seen before. Last time I was there I was late for a meeting at the top of the Grande Arche after my hotel TV, which I’d set as the alarm, helpfully came on muted. Next thing I know, frantic calls to see where I was and several arguments with taxi drivers who were averse to the very idea of heading towards Defense in the rush hour because of la circulation.

No such trouble this time around, leaving us time for a slow walk east through the tall buildings back to the metro by which we hot-footed it to Le Printemps for tea under the dome.

Well, that’s changed somewhat. Gone are the nice old mirrors and the brassware. It’s been considerably moderened up since I was last there ten or so years back and I’m not sure it’s for the better. The one thing they haven’t changed, of course, is that glorious glass roof, and the addition of mirrors on the tables, which I don’t remember from before, is a good one as it means you can easily look up by looking down, so no need to crane.

The dome inside Printemps

I read the first few pages of this book on Amazon. It’s a great start. Two kids larking about in the snow. One throws a snowball and misses the other, hitting the preacher’s pregnant wife instead. She goes into labour, has the child, and in the process suffers some kind of mental upset.

The snowball thrower feels no guilt at all, but the kid he missed finds himself living with the guilt for the rest of his life. This book is the story of that life, and the effect that the guilt has upon it.

Good idea, well executed, and an excellent closure at the furthest end of the book that ties it all up in a neat and satisfying manner. And actually it’s a better ending than I first realised, as it was only a couple of hours after I’d read it that I realised quite what had happened.

But there’s a whole stretch of life in the middle that I’d like to have skipped. I didn’t, of course, or what would have been the point of starting if you weren’t going to read it properly?

So it’s left me a bit undecided. Great idea. Well written. I couldn’t have changed a single word to make it any better. And yet, and yet, and yet… it didn’t grab me. It took too circuitous a route to get from that first thrown snowball to the denouement.

Rating:

When winter is here and the wind is howling, when there’s snow in the air and we’re slipping over on the ice, when the wind is cutting and stinging our eyes and when we’re sheltering from storms as we wait for the train… that’s when I want to remember this scene.

Ten minutes later we found ourselves knee deep in nettles.

I knew we shouldn’t have worn our shorts.