Paris without a plan

Mooch through the Marais, meander along the Canal St Martin, idle - and eat ice-cream - on the Ile St Louis

It might seem perverse to write a post about a trip to Paris basically urging you not to follow my recommendations.

Well, not entirely. There are some places, particularly the restaurant we went to, you might want to seek out but then you might not and that wouldn’t matter.

Basically we - and by we I mean the group of friends I wrote about the other week - went to Paris without a plan. We didn’t book any exhibitions, factor in any trips to museums or feel we had to take in the sights. Paris is so absurdly beautiful it’s like an artwork itself.

We just wandered around in the sunshine - we were unusually lucky with the weather - admiring the blossom, popping into shops and collapsing into bars when we needed a rest.

True, we’d all been to Paris before, two of us regularly so knew roughly the areas to go to and had a local guide in the person of our friend Max who had moved there a couple of months previously but it was still spontaneous.

Here are a few of the things we did and the places we went to but as I say, go with the flow . . .