It has been a long day today, and it feels even longer.   I was staying overnight in Versailles so I could go to a meeting this morning and I got up extra early so I could go out and take some photos in the town before breakfast.   As it happens I was up before the sun – at 5am.  By my reckoning that means I have been up since 4 o’clock this morning, English time.

I’m still not sure how I ended up going over to France for the day, but it brought back some happy memories of when I used to be zipping off all over the place for work and usually ended up in Paris every fortnight.  The main difference was that I flew everywhere in those days and now we have the Channel Tunnel.

I had not taken the Eurostar to Paris before.  We went by tunnel to Calais  last year, which is a lot quicker than a ferry, but for the Paris trip its a lot longer – about two-and-a-half hours instead of the 45 minutes for a flight.  Mind you, I haven’t flown since all the security scares of two years ago so maybe you can’t just turn up at the airport 15 minutes before the flight is due to leave like I used to.

I was looking forward to the trip because it was a  chance to see the new St Pancras station.  I had a 2pm train yesterday so I left work at about 11:30, took a Fastway bus to Gatwick then a Thameslink (or whatever it is called now) to St. Pancras, which was impressive, but it felt more like a shopping centre with trains thrown in.  I liked the statue of the kissing couple.  I had seen photos of it but that did not prepare me for the scale of the thing.

Getting on the train was smooth enough, but I didn’t find it very comfortable.  Apart from anything else it was stuffy.  I was thinking about how even the Connect South Central trains round here have better air conditioning and how bad it was that Eurostar didn’t and then the staff came round with a letter apologising for the AC being broken in our carriage and offering a free trip in the future…  but only a one-way trip.

I reached Paris at 5:30pm, local time, and was not in any rush so instead of taking a train out to Versailles I went for a walk.  First priority was to get away from the immediate vicinity of the Gare du Nord which, apart from being a bit seedy, is plagued with people dragging wheeled luggage.  I don’t know that area too well so I just took bearings from the sun and headed South and West.  Before too long I was perspiring freely from the forehead, temples and neck and by the time I reached the grands boulevards I felt like I was the sweatiest person in Paris.

I ducked into a convenient Virgin megastore to see if I could get tempted by anything, but came away empty-handed.  Now that I no longer watch any French TV channels I have lost touch a bit with what might be worth listening to.

I carried on, ending up going through the Royal Palace to reach the Louvre.  I can’t remember ever seeing the Royal Palace before, which is remarkable considering how many times I have been in the city and how close it is to places I have been to a lot.   By this time I just wanted to get to the hotel but I was so close to the river I figured I would carry on by foot and catch a direct RER rather than get a Metro from the nearest station and have to change, so I crossed the Seine and went along the left bank to St Michel.

I made sure I grabbed a seat on  the upper deck of the train by an open window, but the draft didn’t help much.  By now I was sure I was the sweatiest person in the entire Ile de France region!  Also my feet were killing me.  I was only wearing normal work shoes – not ideal for long walks.  It was a relief to reach Versailles and find the hotel – less than 200 metres from the station – almost immediately.

After a bit of freshening up I decided I was hungry and set out to find some food.  I ended upon the market square where there are a lot of eating places and I finally got my pizza urge out of the way with a delicious quatre saisons with a salade verte and a coke.   By 9pm I was fed and it was still light as I hobbled back to the hotel to sleep like a baby.

This morning I was up before dawn and out taking photos of Versailles as best I could before breakfast.  I then cadged a lift in a colleague’s taxi to get to our office in nearby Elancourt.  We were almost exactly dead on time, but a bit of a cock-up with security passes made us a little late for the meeting, and we missed the introductions.

The meeting was weird.  There were about 10 French trade union reps, three senior French managers plus their support staff and three of us Brits.  The meeting was conducted entirely in French, but we had headsets and a simultaneous translation was done for us.  It was like being in the UN or something.  The real surprise was when it was all over at about 11.  I had been told it would go on until mid-afternoon.   We were all going to be very early for our flights and trains home…

Having plenty of time we grabbed lunch in the canteen first and then I scrounged another lift from my colleagues. They were going to the airport but dropped me off at the local station  at St Quentin first.  From there I got a train direct to Paris – St. Michel again – and then I took a train to Gare du Nord instead of walking.  Fortunately I was able to change my ticket to an earlier train and ended up getting back to Three Bridges at about 7pm instead of about 11pm as planned.

The strange thing is that it was just as sunny in London but it felt fine.  For some reason  the quality of the French sunshine affects me a lot more than British sunshine, and I remembered that it always was that way.  Maybe its a good thing that I didn’t get that job in Meudon earlier in the year.

I’m a bit annoyed that I missed a day and a half of work and had at least five hours travel each way just for a two-hour meeting.  Normally I wouldn’t mind too much, but I have a lot to do at work right now.  I’m not complaining though.  I always try to cram in some shopping or sightseeing to business trips so that its not too much of a drag.  My only regret is that it was so uncomfortably hot I decided to get the early train – otherwise I would have used the unexpected extra hours to visit the Musee d’Orsay or something like that.   Managed to get a few photos though, and it was an unexpected consequence of joining the union.