Last week I took my last sweetheart, my wife of 51 year, to the Golden Wedding Anniversary of my first schoolboy sweetheart. They live in Paris so their celebration was on a boat on the Seine.

Their working lives and travel interests have built a wide circle of contacts, hence we were joined by guests from Norway, the U.S., Hungary, the U.K, France and a wide scatter of academic institutions. The weather was perfect, and the river trip enchanting Paris is an interesting city. It exudes refinement: and we all know about the magnificent tourist bits, but the basic fabric is so right. The city is built horizontally and has remained such – London has now gone vertical producing sunless canyons and no views. Paris has an air of culture, London of commerce and materialism. There is a homogeneous character to the whole white stone built city, it has an excellent network of roads with quite reasonable traffic management; many streets are washed daily so the whole city is clean. It is easy to find your way about on the marvellous bus service, and a clean, highly efficient metro makes underground travel quite pleasant People smile! (But then in Paris it is a pleasure to be alive!) What is surprising to find is that the population density is significantly higher than is London’s. There are fewer houses but a lot more apartments and although the pattern is now changing there is a lot more renting and less ownership. There are probably also fewer rip-off landlords.

There Peripherique – the Paris ring road - makes the M25 look very sick, although here are still some rush-hour jams. It also delineates the city. Inside is Paris, outside is not!

Of course continentals have always enjoyed giving (and receiving) service. We found a superb bistro restaurant near our outer Paris hotel. One evening we met an American lady who had travelled out from her centre hotel just to eat there. It was packed every night. A generous, superbly cooked, even exciting main course, desert, carafe of selected wine, and a coffee cost about £45 for two people. Their steak tartare is a dream and the Crème Broule is to die for.

Restaurant staff move like crazy ants, and rarely give the impression of surly indifference, I dropped a fork, the sound of it hitting the terrazzo floor had barely rung out before a replacement arrived at the table. Every action, transaction, and interaction ends with a Bonjour and a Merci.

Oh, one other pleasure. With all my environmental campaigning I no longer dare to fly, so we travelled Eurostar. What a treat and what an achievement. Their management and the organisation with which they coped with the fire in the tunnel was magnificent. They cancelled all bookings and worked on a first come basis. The schedule was modified so that four or five trains all went one way (spaced by only a few minutes). Later the plug of trains returned so that only one tunnel was required. The handling was exemplary – brilliant. (But then it too is a French run company.) However France has got it wrong on one thing. For my wife’s birthday we took a trip out to the sublime palace and gardens of Versailles. In every one of the magnificent apartments they have installed a huge piece (I will not call it sculpture) in garish plastic by some appalling American (neither will I call him ‘artist’). Whatever got into the minds of the curators is beyond comprehension. And what is worse, many of the visitors were actually photographing them – of course it could have been in appallment! (Just so that you can avoid him I think the name was Koon, or Koons. It should have been coon! And don’t bother to correct me I just do not want to know)