I do love Paris. It gets better every time. I could happily live there. Maybe not forever, but a year of teaching English is very appealing.

We took the Eurostar, first class, leaving late like I have done the last three times I’ve used it, and ate a fantastic lunch. It’s so much better than flying. It’s proper food on proper plates, and with as much as you want to drink all the way to France. It’s a good job it’s all free. I had just €4 to my name, and no English money in my pockets.

We made up lost time and arrived at Gare du Nord on time, to be loaded into taxis and driven to our hotel for baths and showers and drinks before dinner. The excitement started when we headed out for dinner in our coach. All was going well until we got to the Louvre, and our driver rather ambitiously tried to squeeze through a very narrow archway. Of course, there’s not much give in either a coach or an arch and, ultimately, the arch won. It smashed out windscreen and we found ourselves briefly wedged between the two stone pillars. We had no choice but to breathe in and push on, accompanied by a nasty grating scrape.

We eventually made it to the banks of the Seine without any further incident, despite the best efforts of the crazy French drivers who zipped around us like moths around a candle.

We spent the night on a big wooden yacht cruising backwards and forwards along the river, eating good food and cooing over the illuminated sights. We passed the Eiffel Tower just after ten when it was doing its schizophrenic flashing madness and everyone dashed out on deck to take pictures. Apparently that’s a very naughty thing indeed, as the whole lights-on-tower arrangement has been copyrighted by the lighting designer.

Today started at a very respectable 10am with a post-breakfast coach trip to the Institute of the Arab World (Institut du Monde Arab), a tall wedge-shaped building with the most extraordinary windows.

To control the lighting, each is fitted with a series of irises, like those you would find in a camera, which react to the ambient lighting, opening and closing to regulate the illumination. The overall effect is very impressive - doubly so from the inside - and we all stopped to take pictures from the outside before wandering in through the metal detector, that beeped at us all and was thoroughly ignored by the guards.

We went straight up to the roof terrace for more drinks and a second breakfast, and then sat through just an hour of briefings before breaking for some lunch and drinks and then a wander through the streets of Paris. All very agreeable, and apart from the fact the Louvre is closed on Tuesdays, which we only discovered after walking half an hour to get there, very interesting.

I counted the number of panes of glass in the pyramid at the front of the gallery but couldn’t get the number to match up with the 666 Dan Brown reckons there are in there. 684ish was the closest I got.

Our train home was delayed. That’ll be the fourth Eurostar journey mucked up, then. This time it was technical problems that had scuppered us, and our train was cancelled entirely, so we were slipped into the next one, 35 minutes later, then got delayed leaving Paris and delayed before entering the tunnel.

Still, the food was once again nothing short of excellent, although the only distinction between the fish and vegetarian options was that the fish course was salmon and pasta (no sauce) whereas the vegetarian alternative was salmon and rice.

Hmmm??

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