When I found my seat on the Eurostar I found a family of four were occupying all of the four seats in a cluster including mine. What happens is that one kid goes free so the train company just doesn’t give them a seat, no wonder people stop breeding. I felt so guilty about turfing a kid out of my seat that I went and sat in one of the corridor seats near the luggage. This inspired people to come and visit their baggage at regular intervals as a loitering fellow in the luggage bays is a sure sign of mischief.

And don’t get me started on the name ‘Eurostar’.  Due to ego’s that cannot put up with anything that sounds vaguely English or French we have to name everything   ‘Euro’ around here, like the Eurofighter or even more off the cuff the ‘Euro’. How about the ‘florin’ or for the train the ‘flyer’ in a multiple of languages depending on the day of the week. Or let’s choose another language and name everything in that, that’d make the Vulcans happy now wouldn’t it.

So I arrive and take a saunter in the sun from Le Gare Du Nord up to Stalingrad (now there is an example of naming things in a foreign language) and sat down at the end of Le Basin de Villette to dine on Steak and chips – french style of course with loads of sauce and artichoke salad. Opposite me some North Africans had made a home out of cardboard boxes and looked quite happy milling about dealing drugs and sipping on coffee in the afternoon sun.

So this is springtime in Paris, it’s getting to be a yearly event (coming here in Springtime not springtime itself of course) and so my days on the planet will now be measured in Springtimes as a birds life is measured in migrations with winter spent ambling to Australia and back through S.E.Asia and summer in old blighty. I’m bored already – I might have to try interstellar travel – or did I do that one in my teens, I can’t remember.