Priceless!

When one's grandchildren are arriving from Australia,  one rises early, takes the Metro and then the overland train to the airport in plenty of time to arrive before the plane arrives, but not enough to allow for alighting at the wrong terminal and catching the shuttle back, or the following complete failure to find a way to the arrival level while a few more precious tens of minutes tick by.  After all that one arrives perhaps a polite ten minutes after the motley crew have resigned themselves to taking up residence in Charles de Gaulle  Airport, but they seem relatively pleased to see one so that can't be a bad thing.

In an effort to make up lost ground,  and to show off our vast compendium of local knowledge, we intended to spirit the throng away quite quickly and efficiently by buying tickets from the express machine reserved for local credit cards.  It is better, we have discovered, not to insert one's credit card in the wrong orifice in one's haste as the machine immediately goes out of service, joining exactly every other machine at the station.

There was a benefit to this though: watching two tired, hungry and jet-lagged boys enjoy pretending to be the drivers of the automatic shuttle car, concentrating intently, leaning for the corners, pulling up at the stops, with running commentary which only those who understood "garbled" could comprehend.

By midday we were running Mr Five ragged while his parents and Mr E managed to get a little badly needed sleep, but we coerced them into joining us for a walk around our village in the cool of the evening.    Mr Five didn't make it back in a conscious state.  Even a concerted effort to insert food into his food insertion point, failed to rouse him from his slumber although it must be said he didn't look quite as tired as his father.

We will tell him of course, when he wakes, about the ice cream he ate and all of the terrific things he did with us,  and he won't have a clue that he didn't.