Advice ignored: don’t do the Loire valley’s most popular Chateau on a Saturday; make sure you arrive early. We’d paid for the buffet, Q. was free, so we made sure we were downstairs for the buffet breakfast – hot food, I’d been assured the night before as

Here I am at a Mercure, just outside Chartres, where all beds were full, for a craft expo, having escaped Paris. J. has mastered the right-hand drive! I’ve successfully bitten my tongue to ribbons on the curbside, navigating, and putting in the odd palliative statement, like, Very good. Now

… at last a show to which I will not feel I am doing a disservice by penning the couple of lines I write here: Forced Entertainment’s The Thrill of it All, at Centre du Georges Pompidou. But first: if you are going to visit the mass-tourist destination of Versailles,

Paris, inconclusive. This seems to be the title, even if our stay has not yet actually concluded. Tomorrow is our last full day here. A day, then, today, as inconclusive as any we’ve had here. Not unsatisfactory, exactly. But a few key movements were rather brought to an end

We went to La Villette, Cité des Sciences, an area of Soviet-style indoctrination – with the democratic, positivist twist of being pro-participation and pro-tech-progress – and ideologically driven from start to finish. Advertised as one of the newest parks, it boasts gardens, a canal cuts through it, themed ‘follies’ – wrought from red-painted

It was to be a housekeeping day today, a hunt for the Deutsche Bahn office, for a start, to claim a refund on the tickets that were supposed to bring us here first class, by train, and brought us second, then with no class at all, on the backseat of