Best of friends

I was looking for the Palace of the Kings of Mallorca, and lost my bearings in the maze of narrow side streets that comprises the old quarter of Perpignan. In a street so narrow I could span it with outstretched arms, a youth on a motorbike roared past me doing a wheelie. Further up the street, a man relaxing in the doorway of a stationery shop was happy to direct me.

‘English?’ he said, wanting to talk. I admitted as much. He nodded towards a portable TV set on the counter just inside his shop. On the screen, in glorious sunshine, the band of the Grenadier Guards was marching down the Champs-Elysées playing ‘Rule Britannia’. It was the annual Bastille Day parade and the Guards had been invited, presumably, to mark the centenary of the Entente Cordiale. It was impossible to watch those glossy bearskins in the Champs-Elysées without fantasising that, while I had been wandering the Pyrenees, Mr Blair had successfully risked his political career on an invasion.