It is snowing

I am having a strange time. I am in Paris, on a covert mission that I cannot talk about, living in the building in the picture in a tiny apartment that smells of someone else's poo.

Every day I go somewhere where extremely nice people who are 10 years younger than me carefully explain things that I know already. I watch things happen and try and make them go as well as they could; if they do not, I demonstrate my maturity by not worrying about it.   I go for a long walk and I look at things; in the evenings I go to the many food shops on rue Montorgeuil and look at things I do not buy: cheeses and confections, mainly, although tonight I have a small apple tart and some Tomme de Savoie and a pear.

I come  home and I drink one or two glasses of faine waine; I eat a salad or a grilled meat and some sort of vegetable; I watch television programmes on the internet; I go to sleep, and I sleep well, and I wake up and it starts again.  I am not sure where the time is going, although it is passing pleasantly enough.

My husband is not here, which is not as it should be.  But still, it is beautiful here, and I feel as if it, like London, is sort-of my city, because we lived here when I was a tiny child for four years.  We lived in Neuilly-sur-Seine and my brother and I went to L'Ecole Active Bilingue, and became bilingual when we were very young; when I was 12 and doing my French O-Level oral exam the lady said: "There is no point carrying on; you speak better French than I do." It was true; she sounded like an underpaid extra from 'Allo 'Allo. Now, of course, the Parisians pat me on the shoulder and tell me that really, my accent is not so bad, and that I should not worry, because I do not yet have "a trace of Quebec".

I walked a long way the other day to go to a bookshop on the rue de Rivoli. The rue de Rivoli is full of stupid tourist shops selling aprons with cats in berets on.  I was looking for Shakespeare & Co which I thought was there but that wasn't; instead there was an alarming branch of WHSmith, that I did not go in to, and another shop, called Galignani, which said on its awning that it was "the first English bookshop established on the continent".   It smelt like a French bookshop smells, and the boys at the till wore tight cashmere v-necks and heavy spectacles and muttered rudely about the man who ran up and down the shop building a pile of hugely expensive art books. "C'est une PATHOLOGIE", said one, as he deposited a book about Vermeer that must have cost a hundred Euros.

It is snowing now. They do not really know what to do with snow here, despite the fact that the hipsters wear Canada Goose jackets and gigantic beards.   I am going to stay inside in my tiny poo-smelling flat and eat my apple tart and watch English television on the internet, and tomorrow I shall go and look at Versailles.