I’m in Paris in the springtime and one cannot fail to be charmed by this city.

Parisienne women are chic and enviably at ease with themselves and I feel like a tramp in comparison…..especially as Sarah, my travelling and training companion is also looking extremely glam and I am tawdry by comparison.

We have spent much of the day travelling – a 6.15am start from home, Eurostar here and then lots of taxis. So, including a full afternoon on my feet presenting has made this a long day.

Sarah and I are both ‘home birds’ and so we were both in the frame of mind that said we needed to make sure our night in Paris was a good one. A bit of surfing found us ‘Le Potager du Marais’ – a vegetarian restaurant just around the corner from the Pompidou Centre, right in the heart of town.

A hearty meal and a carafe of wine later and we are both replete and happy as we can be given that we are 250 miles from home and away from our loved ones. I must say, this little hippyfied piece of Paris was a complete joy. The food was lovely – mushroom pate to die for and a really good ambience. A good gossip rounded off a really cool evening with a colleague who has become a friend in recent times though I hardly knew her before all this madness.

I got back without a photo and checked out my ‘bank shots’ from earlier……nothing inspiring there, then the Eiffel Tower’s searchlight caught my eye and I thought ‘I wonder if I can capture that’. No tripod and a high window ledge meant I was moving a heavily weighted table up from the floor onto the bed. The camera was set to timer and away we went.

The first shot was nothing more than the reflection in the window of my room of a tripod on a bed! The second shot was better because I switched off the lights and had nothing reflecting off the window but I failed to time it right so got no searchlight! Finally, I got it right! Well as right as I could given the equipment I had with me and the conditions.

So, La Tour Eiffel as seen from the Marriott hotel in Nouilly!! Voila! The 'small' tower (it's a perspective thing) to the left of this pic is the Montparnesse tower - the scene of a terrifying, windy experience for DM who found himself unable to walk out onto its tundra when we visited Paris together four summers ago in the most dreadful weather. It was so wet in July that we were 'confined to our room' (shame)because all our clothes were too wet to wear!!!

Tomorrow is another day of training. I may even get a daytime shot. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.

My messages tonight are:

The world – bonne nuit

DM – Je t’aime

Dogses – slurp (a slurp is a slurp in any language)

Two years ago we saw Mat and Mand -

who drifted out of our lives like flotsam on a river and a year ago I was using my new photographic gizmo for the first time and feeling thrilled with it.