Everything is better in Paris: atmosphere, food, sex, light, walking down the street holding hands.

A trip to Paris with the Next (In Effect) Mrs Lezard. This is my first trip abroad for over two years, and I am so excited I don't even mind having to get up at 4am, which seems to be the only time one can take advantage of the cheap Eurostar deal. I will spare you the details of our stay, except to say that Paris is the same as ever, only more crowded with tourists and shockingly expensive.

I had also hitherto assumed that the euro and the pound had not yet achieved parity, but once you've been rooked for commission you'll find that £100 will get you about €90, which in turn will get you two gin and tonics and a croque-monsieur, with no tip.

We are managing to avoid the expense of a hotel thanks to the great generosity of my friend Amel, who used to be an au pair of mine but has since - I am so proud! - become a teacher at the Sorbonne. Yet, even with a free gaff, Paris sucks money out of us like a Dyson.

At one point, as I contemplate some mind-boggling bill, I wonder whether I am going to have to become, like George Orwell in the book that almost gives this column its title, a plongeur in a restaurant, sleeping in some vermin-infested fleapit. Down and Out in Paris and London is not,
by the way, a good book to read before a trip to Paris. You read sentences such as: "It is a mere statement of fact to say that a French cook will spit in the soup - that is, if he is not going to drink it himself." I do not order any soup while there, but at one point I dice with death by ordering a steak tartare, which leaves me feeling uncomfortable for a couple of days.

But putting all that aside, the return to London is miserable, and not just because it involves a temporary separation from the N (I E) Mrs L. I start up a big, angry debate on Facebook when I ask people to tell me one way in which London is superior to Paris.Apart from taxis, which don't count because you can get by without them in Paris, the only half-convincing example is given by my friend Louisa, who says London is better "because it's got us in it", but that's not really Paris's fault. Everything is better in Paris: atmosphere, food, sex, light, walking down the street holding hands.
You even think better in Paris. I lost count of the number of bookshops I came across.

You sometimes even get the impression that there are more English-language bookshops over there than there are over here. I particularly recommend the highly browsable Abbey Bookshop in the rue de la Parcheminerie, fifth arrondissement, where,
after a boozy al fresco lunch, the owner refused to accept payment for a copy of The Unquiet Grave, itself a hugely franco­philic book, and one which contains much that is useful and wise ("Women differ from men in that to break with the past and mangle their mate in the process fulfils a dark need", et cetera).

Pants to that

Back in the Hovel, there are momentous changes. We now have another occupant: a woman. Razors and I had got into a pleasant, blokey routine of an evening - like Furex, the communist drunk in Down and Out in Paris and London, Razors likes to throw empty wine bottles around when he's had a few - but now that there is a feminine element to the Hovel we are learning to behave.

I am certainly having to rethink my formerly somewhat laissez-faire policy of walking around the place during the day in my underpants. This woman is in fact an old friend, down on her luck yet still one of the nicest and wittiest people I know, so having her around
is a pleasure, but I suspect she does not appreciate our happy-go-lucky approach to domestic hygiene. Razors says he saw her cleaning the tops of the doors the other day. "Doors have tops?" I asked.

One evening, I come home and feel a displacement, a sense of airiness, vacancy, a realignment of the Hovel's geometry. I eventually work it out: the enormous pile of review copies (a dozen books a week for two years, imagine that), about as large and menacing as an un­stable Welsh dresser, has been tidied away. How does she do it? I am amazed, and, I must admit, a bit self-reproachful.

Maybe I can learn something.

Nicholas Lezard's column appears weekly

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