I have to apologise for the excess holidaying this year. I started in January with two things booked and it just escalated from there. Not that I’m complaining at all. I am currently sitting in a cab in stationary traffic outside the Gare du Nord in Paris, wondering whether it would have been quicker to take the Metro. However, I would have missed my driver’s acerbic comments on the authorities that plant trees and then dig them all up again.

I am on my way to Aix en Provence for a weekend of singing with my choir and a local one. We are doing two concerts, one on Saturday evening and one on Sunday afternoon.

Those of you who have been with this blog a while will be pleased to note that I appear to have booked the right trains this time! I am travelling on a senior (= old) Interrail pass which is the most complicated thing to manage I’ve seen for a long time. For example, it covered my journey from Frome to London but I had to book a seat on GWR – once I’d found out how to book a seat without paying for a ticket. It covered the Eurostar journey but again, I had to book a seat on Rail Europe – booking carried over to Eurostar. SO complicated.

The area round the Gare du Nord, like round King’s Cross in London, used to be a bit of a wasteland. It has been much done up since. In the early 80s, when I was living in Lot et Garonne, I got a lift with a friend to Paris to get the train (and ferry) home to the UK. She dropped me off a couple of miles away from the station at 4am. I walked to the station thinking I would snooze on a bench until my train at 7.30. Unfortunately, I discovered that they locked the station between 4 and 6 am to get rid of the homeless who basically lived there. I put my suitcase down in a doorway, sat on it and was just dropping off when I realised that the rest of the doorway was full of those thrown out of the station. I could hear whispering along the lines of ‘What is she doing here?’ Suppressing thoughts of rape and murder, I woke up and explained the situation. The whispering changed to ‘Oh, you shouldn’t be here, you should be in a hotel’. I explained that my train was going in less than 3 hours and I would be fine. ‘How much money have we got? She needs a hotel room’. The homeless of Paris were having a whip round for me. I protested enough that they desisted but, when 5am struck they swept me across the road to the cafe that had just opened and insisted on buying me a coffee. I departed when the station opened with many protestations of good will and safe journey and invitations to come back and see them next time I was in the area. One of my more unusual experiences.