Two weeks in France, the last few days in Paris, and I’m ready to come home. Our children, to paraphrase Mr Bennett, have delighted us quite enough. At least here we have proper internet access. I had 10 days of 56k dial up in the south of France and was pulling my hair out.

We’ve had a great time in Paris. Christina and I first met here 15 years ago, but our children seem unimpressed with this. They have been troopers, however, being dragged up and down the boulevards and past various pictures and sculptures of dead people and being told to stop singing every time we go into yet another church. Still, I think they’ve had fun, too. I offer the attached in the Louvre as evidence:

My lasting impression of this trip to Paris (I lived and worked here for a year back in the 90s, but it’s a different city now) is how people don’t actually look at the art or the architecture any more – they take photos of it instead. Rather than staring at the Winged Victory of Samothrace, just hold up your cell phone!

But Lordy, it is expensive. I’m just grateful that my grasp of the US/Euro exchange is sufficiently loose for me not to have killed myself every time I buy a beer, which I suspect costs about the same as a small car in Missouri.

One other interesting thing. Yesterday we saw a dear friend of ours, Sandy (in the photo below), who was in living Paris during that fateful summer of 1994. She was also in New York when Chris and I first got together, and she came to our wedding. We hadn’t seen her since then – over eleven years ago. So we sat down, ready for a good chat – and discovered that we had no news. Why? Because of bloody facebook, that’s why. She already knew all there was to know. It was still wonderful to see her, of course, but it felt odd, having to review what we’d written online to check we weren’t repeating ourselves to someone we hadn’t seen for over a decade.

In other news, the manuscript is with the agent in New York, and we wait with baited breath for her verdict. After that, we have to decide where/how/when to sell the thing. US or UK first? Watch this space.

We fly home tomorrow. Wish us luck.