Mrs Spencer had to spend five days in Paris during half-term observing ballet classes, so my son Edward and I tagged along too, on the strict understanding that watching dance lessons was absolutely not on the agenda as far as we were concerned.
It came as a jolt to realise that my first visit to Paris had been 45 years earlier when my parents took me there at the age of eight. I can’t remember much about it except the pungent smells from the drains, buying a much loved penknife and the evening when my mother was taken ill in a restaurant while tackling a particularly glutinous bowl of onion soup that trailed yards of elastic cheese.
My father went off to help her in her distress and I was left alone at the table, only to be joined by an overfriendly American who offered to buy me all the sweets I wanted and to take me on a trip around the world.
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