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Riding the Eurostar is simply embarassing if you’re a Brit. One of the world’s most powerful, fastest trains humbled by a crap track network. It’s a shame the speedy bit of line only runs from mid-Kent down to the coast, forcing you to crawl through the ugly suburbs out of London on the commuter line.

We didn’t even make it beyond Herne Hill yesterday before we ground to a halt. Fortunately we had a PR expense account to keep us amused, so we decamped to the buffet and drank beer and ate goats cheese while the winds whipped around outside.

It had pulled down a tree, which was now blocking the line, leaving all trains coming out of London stranded - us included.

Fifteen cans later (not each - there were five of us) we were still there, and the buffet was out of drinks for the foreseeable future, so we went back to slump in our seats and make snarky comments about the state of the British railways.

We made it to Paris seven hours later, but not before we’d reversed back up to Waterloo then taken an alternative route out through Surrey and across country to pick up the original line to the tunnel.

By then, of course, it was far later than we’d been expecting. It’s luck Paris doesn’t shut down at half eight like London seems to do, so after a white knuckle ride through the Parisian traffic, taking a multiple-choice approach to roundabout lane control and traffic light obeyance, we pulled up outside a snazzy seafood restaurant in Bastille.

It served the biggest prawn things I’ve ever seen. Not being a prawn person I’m not actually sure what they were, but they had long whiskers and beady eyes, and by the time the people behind us had finished eating them it looked like there had been a massacre of fingerbobs at their table.

Two further death-defying taxi rides later, we spend the night in a hotel on La Fayette. There was a little sign screwed into the wall by the entry door that marked it out as a Parisian hotel of character. What this meant, I discovered on entering my room, was that it was not been decorated since the time of De Gaulle, and everything - the carpet, the curtains, the wallpaper, the bed spread, the pillows - was identical. It made finding the bed all but impossible in the half light.

Still, at least I had 24 channels on the TV, which was 22 more than most of the rest of the group, so I sat up and watched a pretty terrible French drama which consisted of a man taking off his shirt a lot, ostensibly so a female friend could stay warm, but actually so the plot could involve his wife finding him half naked with a random woman.

The rest of the time I spent playing with the hair dryer, which I am fairly sure was actually some kind of covert weapon on account of the re-arm button.

The actual worky bits happened today in a building our psycho taxi driver couldn’t find without reference to a map (while driving and causing cyclists to swerve at random intervals over the banks of the Seine). It turned out to be an institute for medical science, so I’m sure that the top floor was populated by Beagles dragging on Galloises. Fortunately we stayed in the resolutely non-smoking ground floor library, which was very Cluedo and made all the iMacs in the corner look particularly uncomfortable about their retro surroundings.

It was a long series of interviews, really, and I ended up taking a book-load of notes, which got progressively messier as the wine and champagne continued to flow. All in all, not a bad day, though, and I got far more material for the feature I’m writing than I could possibly use, which is good.

Also good was the easy journey home. No fallen trees this time around, and as a bonus the Americans in the seats behind me fell asleep until Kent, then complained about having missed all the ‘excitement’ of going through the tunnel.

Paris to home in three and a bit hours is pretty good going, though, and makes the train - when it’s working properly - a far better option than the plane, which is out of the city at either end, and involves a boring check-in.

It would have been nice to have stayed longer, but tomorrow is going to be a busy day, so I really didn’t have time to extend it. If it had been a Thursday - Friday trip rather than Wednesday - Thursday, though, I’d have gladly risked another couple of crazy taxi rides to spin it out across the weekend.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 8th, 2004 at 11:26 pm and is filed under Europe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.