On Saturday night we cooked Chicken Kiev to empathise with Petite Soeur who is currently shooting a Dulux commercial in the Ukraine. Oi! Garlic! Butter! More Garlic! More Butter! No vampires came near us all evening. Yesterday Petite rang to wish me happy birthday and told us that the hotel, the weather and, above all, the food in the Ukraine are excruciatingly bad. No Chicken Kiev to be had anywhere.

We have started feeding the possums again after neglecting them for weeks while we travelled. I gave them strawberries last night to assuage my guilt. Paris has no possums but our appartment was in Rue d'Esquirol - Squirrel Street. We didn't see any squirrels but we did see beautiful beautiful Paris and all its wonders. And tasted the best ice-cream in the world, excellent crepes, leaden croque madame, tolerable wine and vastly inferior fruit and vegetables. I bought two jumpers in Gap and lots and lots of books, all written in French so requiring concentration.

We went to a revue at the Lido which looked a lot less sleezy than the Moulin Rouge from the outside. The show itself was colourful but rather lame: I think it had been toned down for the more conservative tourists. I have seen far racier things in Melbourne.

One Saturday we went to a marche aux puces (flea market) where Right Foot was in his element. He even found an aeroplane ashtray, at a price no Aussie could consider. Much of the stuff there would have been in an antique shop in Australia. When I could finally drag Right Foot away we went to Pere Lachaise Cemetery which was cold, wet and pretty miserable. We struggled with our map in the wind and rain, trying to find Abelard and Heloise, the original residents. Several people asked us for directions to Jim Morrison's grave. We eventually caught up with them all - Spaniards, Italians, Japanese, all way to young to remember Jim Morrison but making the pilgrimage all the same. The young Italian was quietly singing 'Light my fire'. Right Foot had only one question - 'who was Jim Morrison?'