Why is it that people always seem to think if you are off to Paris you must be going to have some kind of romantic breakaway? ‘How romantic’ and ‘Is it a second honeymoon?’ have both been wafted my way by people who knew I was off to Paris for a few days.

Well……..NO! Not all trips to Paris are romantic ones.

When I was nine years old my mother took me to Paris for five days – my father not being too keen on crossing water and my mother desperate for some kind of foreign travel experience. We were very much UK-holiday goers and it represented a wonderful and scary dip into the unknown, and largely unknowable. We went by hovercraft and train (my mother had - and still has - a horror of aeroplanes!) which made it seem a lot further away I suppose. It wasn’t a romantic trip although it was quite an adventure.

I have been to Paris several times since. I cannot honestly say that any of the other visits were of a romantic nature either – Paris doesn’t particularly speak to me of romance, well certainly not the soppy, sloppy, kissing-on-bridges type of romantic claptrap but I’m not that kind really. I have a far too short concentration span to sit gazing into someone’s eyes for more than a few seconds.

This trip was not a romantic getaway for hubby and me; it was a Paris taster for the girlie and a chance to catch up on some research for her Uni course which she starts in the autumn, History of Art. We left on Thursday morning on the Eurostar and returned last night on same. In the two days in between we covered a lot of ground – literally.

The girlie has a fear of undergrounds – any subterranean spaces really – so we had to walk – a lot! We did the Pompidou Centre, the Musee d’Orsay, the Eiffel Tower, a river boat trip, the Louvre, and Notre Dame. We beheld a lot of places in between as well. It was an incredible amount of culture to cram into a couple of days but so well worth it. The snow on the Eiffel Tower was a bit bizarre, as was the general reluctance to dispense with Christmas - Notre Dame still had a massive tree outside - but the art part was always impressive.

The Japanese tourists were an absolute hoot. They were all clustered round the Mona Lisa trying to snap each other posing by her with their cameras and phones. One guy couldn’t get near enough the real thing so he was taking a photo on his phone of the black and white photocopy of her picture near the door. They thronged round the statue of Venus, taking it in turns to stand proudly in front to have yet another picture taken. I told the girlie that they had to provide proof they had actually been in Paris.

One lady was just walking through the gallery screening the entire stroll onto her video camera and not actually looking at anything as she went. That seemed so very odd. But they had us in stitches more than a few times.

The last few hours of the trip however were a little less fast-paced. The girlie managed to fall down a few steps in the Louvre and sprain her ankle. She hobbled on valiantly but increasingly more painfully, until she simply could not carry on and we made a very slow and uncomfortable journey back to the hotel and thence to the station. Fortunately I did have a book to read as without it the last four and a half hours of enforced sitting around would have been a bit tedious – although I didn’t mind having a break from all the walking!