How hard could it be to find a hat in an ancient city the streets of which were filled with market stalls?
Very, it seems when the hat has to fit a head with a sixy-one centimetre circumference, or perhaps it was 'very' because there were so many stalls in so many streets that finding a hat became less important to some of us (the ones with more hair it has to be said) as the day wore on. In the end it was a black one and very satisfactory too, that materialised in the nick of time, which is a very good thing because time seems to have been quite important in this town.
The clock in the cathedral for instance, the one with several hundred functions and thirty thousand moving parts is so accurate that it has one hand which only moves in a leap century. Having been built in 1853, none of it's originators would have seen that hand move as it did in 2000, and we have been assured that it will again in a little under four hundred year's time.
I suspect that if we were to live for another four hundred years our mastery of the French language may improve to similar degrees of precision, but for now we are happy enough to find our ice creams at last, order four and be served five.
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