When you get this, I’ll be in France on a trip that took detective skills and twenty years of work.<\/p>\n
It’s my 20th wedding anniversary on 3 August and I will be with Angela Gallagher in Paris. We honeymooned there and that’s where the detective work came in.<\/p>\n
I was sure the hotel had changed its name and anyway, I wasn’t certain what it was. I remembered a shop on the same street, though, so I got out Apple Maps and Google Streetview and I searched Paris for where we had honeymooned.<\/p>\n
Hours of searching, phoning hotels in the city, struggling with my schoolboy French, I did it all and booked our room.<\/p>\n
Then, late one night, Angela couldn’t sleep. She went into our living room, crossed to the shelves and took out a book to read. A piece of paper fell out. A letter she’d used as a bookmark.<\/p>\n
Twenty years ago. <\/p>\n
The letter was the original booking confirmation for the hotel.<\/p>\n
And with my detective work, I had got us a room in the right part of Paris, the right hotel, the right floor and just two doors away from where we were in 1994.<\/p>\n
Weird to think that the hotel had stayed there all this time. (It has changed its name but only slightly; it’s old name is now prefixed by a different company’s one.) Very strange to see the place from Apple Maps and Google Maps, neither of which were imagined or maybe imaginable back then.<\/p>\n
And very weird to think that amongst so much change in the world and in my life, Angela is still with me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When you get this, I’ll be in France on a trip that took detective skills and twenty years of work. … Continue reading