Nous aurons toujours Paris

Les leafs naturels de l'if, Sceaux
This is a reference. Approximately two of my readers will understand.

Parental visits are something of a challenge.

When my family first visited Paris in 1994, a combination of good fortune and ruthlessly efficient forward planning meant that we managed to experience pretty much all the major sights in three days. All well and good, you might think, but it means that since they've now been visiting me here for the last five years, it's more and more difficult to find things to entertain them with. We've long since moved on from the A-list tourist spots, scuttled through the B-list ones, and are now into the realms of "vaguely nice things that are sort of near Paris and might be worth seeing" - cf. the entry from two weeks ago.

So my progenitors (mmm thesauruses) were back up from Nice this weekend after two weeks of searching for wild flamingos (paternal) and improbably long-range cycling (maternal).

So, Sceaux.

Château de Sceaux

There it is. It's in the outback of zone 3, on the Chevreuse branch of line B. It's alright. There's a lakey thing (much like Versailles) and people playing football nearby, which commonly results in floating ball incidents, and teenagers debating whether to jump into water murkier than an Italian referee's history. Maybe you'll want to go there sometime and witness such a thing. There are worse ways of spending a sunny afternoon.

Meanwhile, quite aside from the parents, my lack of recent blogular action can be attributed to:

1. Spending far too many nights down the pub with people of various nationalities glued to the Weltmeisterschaft. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
2. Doing concerts with Eddy and wondering when, or indeed whether, the nice cheque will arrive in the post. I guess the good thing about having a well-known convicted fraudster as your manager is that you know absolutely for sure that he has a dodgy past. With most band managers you just suspect it.
3. Concluding no nice summer job is going to fall into my lap, agreeing to stay looking after a Paris hotel all July and August, then promptly having The Best Summer Job Ever suddenly fall into my lap.
4. Backpedalling like an epileptic hamster.