I don’t know if you have ever been to Paris, but it’s basically a kind of London for girls. I generally try to avoid the place, as you can’t get a decent curry and there’s nothing in the shops unless you are an anorexic dwarf. But a couple of times a year I used to find myself on a breakneck taxi ride between the (pretty crummy) Gare de Lyon and the (crummier still) Gare Montparnasse, trying to catch a train to Bordeaux.
Only after my sixth visit did I learn that there was no need for this ludicrous trip. Instead of changing trains in Paris, you could simply hop off the Eurostar at Lille, have some chips and a pint at the bar, then jump on an almost empty TGV train which runs all the way from Lille to Bordeaux. Simples.
Why did it take me years to find this out? Because, as John Kay writes in his groundbreaking new book Obliquity, computers are incapable of oblique thinking.
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