Jealous?

I have really enjoyed my break - we decided to whizz off for 3 days in Paris! It's over 15 years since John and I were last there, when we were first together.

It was a bit chilly for hanging around outside, so we pounded the halls of as many galleries and museums as we could fit in, before our feet withdrew their services in protest.

John was keen to visit the Louvre for the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo.

My favourite was probably the Musee d'Orsay, where they keep the bulk of the post-impressionist work. I can never get enough of it: the colour combinations make my blood zing! Totally inspiring.

It's astonishing too, standing in a room surrounded by paintings, every one of which is so famous that it's worth millions. Weird.

And we had to visit Monet's waterlilies of course. Fabulous.

The Orangerie is such a great space too: emanating calm in the centre of the city, like a secular cathedral to colour and light...

I took my sketchbook as you can see, but with such a short time and so much to pack in, I hardly opened it in Paris itself. At the top is a breakfast stop in a cafe, waiting for the Arts et Metiers to open. I highly recommend the museum: a massive collection of technological inventions through the ages, including the first flying machines, like this one:

Plus the earliest computers, all sorts of working models, and even Foucault's Pendulum, hanging all the way down from the apex of a chapel.

All the rest of the sketches were drawn on the Paris train, on our way back to the airport, or on the flight home, like these last two. Bit boring, so sorry about that.

I rather liked this pony-tailed man on the plane though, who was sitting next to John. Trouble was, John was in the way in-between us, and got rather tetchy about me keep asking him to 'sit back'! I managed in the end, though was annoyed that I ran out of page for the ponytail.