Inside the Travel Lab

I’d been to Paris once before. It was one of those rush around the museums by coach on a tight schedule affairs, one minute looking at bizarre hanging installations in the Pompidou Centre…

Just a reminder that the idea behind eating cardboard to stay size zero, having surgery to look young and all the other painful and dangerous practices people get up to in order to fit the current idea of “beauty” is nothing new…

In the midst of a fresh Paris spring, I was standing in another building with scuffed wooden floors…

“We’ll always have Paris,” as the immortal line goes. Now, it seems, Paris will always have something to remember as well…

To avoid disappointment, let me state right now that I am not a sports journalist. However, build up enough atmosphere, enough history, enough daring and enough personal flair and I’m hooked…

Over the years, I’ve travelled by coach, plane and train to reach the City of Lights. I even hitch-hiked once. Each time I arrive, I remember why I keep coming. It’s for views like this – and the onion soup, of course

The legend caramalises down to this. A rushed and harassed sister, baking in Paris at the Hotel Tatin, around 1898

Montmartre is a village, my mother used to say; an island rising out of the Paris fog.
Vianne Rocher, The Lollipop Shoes by Joanne Harris
The Lollipop Shoes delivers a thriller, wrapped in the shiny foil and sugar-dusted facade of a tale about a chocolate shop.