Varifocals has just returned from Paris! A magical city I have never before visited and on the first afternoon there I was convinced I was going back. We went to Le Marais, an area of small streets, unique shops and tiny restaurants spilling out onto the pavements. A blog shouldn't be a tourist guide - just look it up for yourselves - and go if you can! The Left Bank is now more Armani than intellectual so I stayed on the Right Bank, drank wine under a bridge over the Seine, sat in cool squares lined with Chesnut Trees and walled in by eighteenth-century buildings.

The city is a wonderful place to people watch (actually so is anywhere one can sit quietly with a coffee or a drink and see the world wander by on a nice day, doesn't have to be Paris - try Much Wenlock or Shrewsbury, but I'm in love with Paris right now). I made word sketches of the people I saw and short sentences about places to remind me afterwards. Text photos to be the basis of stories and perhaps part of the much neglected novel that is supposed to be 'on the go' and is more usually 'on the stop'. I bought a selection of black and white postcards of Paris in the 20s and 30s and thought I could make stories out of them.

Paris seemed quieter than London, easier to be in somehow. And, for once, I didn't get lost. Varifocals is renowned for shortsightedness and a serious inability to find the way anywhere, famously turning the wrong way to get home from Sainsbury's. (Oh, Telford!) But not in Paris - no confusion, never stuck for the right (or left) turn and even the map in the Rough Guide was comprehensible. The Metro was simple and cheap and the trains full of buskers who got on and off at every stop. I'd never heard a saxophone played on the tube before.

All this must make for some writing material of course. And the blog is doing its work because now I am recharged I've set myself tasks of at least an hour a day at the keyboard and / or making more sketches in a notebook to use at a later date. I don't use the moleskins (although they seem to work for everyone else!). There's a brand of stationery called Clairefontaine in all sizes and very bright, cheerful colours which inspire me. I stocked up on some notebooks, big and small when in Paris - carrying the baggage back home was a problem! So this is a happy, post- holiday blog with no axes to grind, only written for the joy of it all.

That's it. Time to go the vet. to discuss latest ways of cat flea control.