List item No. 9 - take Antonia to Paris Bonjour everyone.

As mentioned last week, we have just spent a whirlwind weekend in Paris, visiting as many of the landmark sites as we could cram into three days.

We toured the Louvre, seeing the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo and the Egyptian Antiquities; climbed the Eiffel Tower (but not quite to the top) and stood beneath the Arc de Triomphe.

We saw Notre Dame, Sacre Coeur and the Place de la Sorbonne, and we took a boat ride on the River Seine.

It was exhausting but great fun.

There were enormous queues everywhere and we realised very quickly that it was best to get up very early and get there first. Even so, arriving half an hour before the Eiffel Tower opened, there were still several hundred people in line in front of us. There were several thousand a couple of hours later when we left.

Spouse and I spent our honeymoon in Paris just over 30 years ago, and fell in love with this beautiful city. We returned a couple of years later, riding our motorbike, which is definitely not to be recommended. But once we had stopped shaking (French drivers are very frightening), we found the city as charming as we had before.

But with the arrival of the children, city breaks gave way to sea-side holidays or camping in the Lake District and, although we have visited EuroDisney at different times with all of the children, this was the first time we had returned to Paris itself.

Daughter number four, who loves museums, really wanted to see the Mona Lisa. She had been warned that, for such a world famous painting, it is much smaller and more insignificant than you might imagine, but she still wanted to see that it for herself.

So she did, and agreed that it is, but it was worth the journey for that experience alone. As for spouse and I, we found the city busier and dirtier than we remembered. This might have been because we weren’t viewing it with that rosy glow of youth but actually I think it really has deteriorated and is in need of some financial investment. Still, I’m sure the same could be said of me.