.. I forgot about the seven hours or so in Minneapolis Airport on the way back.

In Minneapolis Airport, on the balcony which is reserved for quietness [and quietness can indeed be achieved, apart from the fact that it's open to the main concourse, so the sounds of people and piped music make their way up quite easily] there are deep, wide, armchair-like leather seats, which, if placed facing each other, can be made into a little boat-shaped nest to sleep in. I did this for quite a long time, alternating between sleeping and reading a book, with occasional breaks to wander about and buy more food to relieve the monotony of Still Being In an Airport.

In the middle of bout of book-reading, I saw, out of the edge of my eye, what I perceived to be a very fast moving small brown thing come flying out of the adjacent corridor along the ground, and disappear under my seat. I jumped up to see what it was, partly due to the notion that I might be so tired that I was now hallucinating, and wanted to prove to myself that there really was a Brown Thing. I couldn’t find it, but a man several metres away looked over at me scrabbling frantically and said, ‘I saw it too – a little mouse. It’s gone under my seat.’

So a) I wasn’t hallucinating, and b) it wasn’t a bomb or anything – just a mouse. Good. Settled back down, but we observed the same mouse (well, either that or one that looked very much like it, anyway – don’t know how many lived there and whether they had some sort of relay system in place) descend from a hole in the seat of the man’s chair and run backwards and forwards between chair and corridor several more times. It must have been the official Airport Mouse – seemed quite well-established, anyway.

I can’t remember much else, apart from that we ate Mexican food, and one of the airport shops was full of merchandise covered in Uplifting Slogans™, which made me feel quite miserable.

Anyway, that’s the end of my writing about the trip [except for passing references that will possibly occur in future], because it was several months ago now and I’m starting to feel my age.

Normal complaining will be resumed in due course.

Prior to last month’s trip, my only experiences of airline food were a) a plate of pickles on the way to the Czech Republic and b) ordering a sandwich on a rather short Ryanair flight, which finally arrived – looking sweaty and disgusting – just as we landed, and was immediately sent back for a refund. But flying to America takes ages and ages. There were hours to fill, obviously, and since sometimes eating can alleviate boredom, I decided to try everything. Well, nearly.

About half an hour after take-off we received a drink [I had orange juice] and a mini packet of pretzels. Pretzels are strange: I wouldn’t say I like them, wouldn’t say I dislike them, but when there are some near me I cannot stop eating them. I do wonder whether they are infused with some kind of addictive chemical. Anyway, this was more than tolerable; I’d give it a rating of Quite Good.

The main meal was a choice between chicken or pasta. I had the pasta, and realised halfway through eating it that it tasted almost exactly the same as something called a ‘Snack Stop’ which I bought in bulk during my first year of university because it was 20p for two packets at KwikSave. Snack Stops were like a very slightly posher version of a Pot Noodle: tiny pasta twists in powdered, dehydrated cheese and herb sauce, to which one added boiling water, left to stand for two minutes and then ate from the plastic pot it came in, if one had, for example, woken up too late to cook lunch before a lecture. Or was too hungover to cook food. Or, was hiding in one’s room from certain people, for many and varied reasons, and needed to cook things without going into the kitchen and getting caught.

Anyway: like Snack Stops, the pasta on the plane was pretty disgusting. But due to the nostalgia element, I kind of enjoyed it.

We were also provided with some wine [which was OK], a bread roll and a piece of cheese, some ’salad’ [I think it had been salad once; or, the ingredients comprising it had once been ingredients with which someone might make a salad, but probably weren't by the time they were actually combined] and a Really Scary Looking Cake, which I ignored.

Afterwards there were jugs of luke-warm tea and coffee; I overheard a flight attendant tell someone that they were running out of the tea due to an unexpectedly high number of English people on the plane.

I don’t actually remember any further food on the plane itself – by the time we landed in Minneapolis to wait for the connecting flight, our bodies were expecting it to be 2am and I was feeling fairly strange. It was 6pm local time. I decided that the only sensible thing to do would be to find somewhere that would sell me a gin and tonic, and drink it. So that is exactly what I did.

I know it is considered more appropriate to go and look at things such as the Eiffel Tower, Louvre etc. when on holiday in Paris, but instead I spent my second day indulging in the pleasingly diverse activities of being experimented on in a psycho-acoustic laboratory, and being taught to knit in an upstairs room of a restaurant.

The main thing that concerned me that morning was that I had to go out and Use The Metro On My Own in order to get to Trevor’s workplace to be experimented on. Fortunately this went very well. I said the phrase which Sophy had told me to say in order to get a booklet of ten tickets, and the woman issuing them did not stare, fail to understand or immediately begin to speak to me in English so I must have said it halfway comprehensibly. I rode the metro, changing twice, and arrived at the correct place, at the correct time.

Then I realised that I had been so concerned about whether the metro would work or not that I had made rather a major mistake in another area, which was Forgetting To Bring The Phone Numbers of Everyone I Know In France. Which was not ideal given that I was supposed to phone Trevor when I arrived and meet him at the Pantheon. After much faffing about, phoning other numbers I had for him, texting his girlfriend to get more numbers off her [thanks Kirsty!], phoning things that played recorded music and someone told me in French that I had done something wrong, or just getting a repeated bleep as an answer, I gave up and went to look for a net cafe where I could email people in a panicked kind of way. I failed to find one, but during my search a text message managed to exchange itself between phones belonging to Trevor and myself – since apparently the phone that played the repeated beeps was the right one an that is the French ringing tone – and eventually we found each other and went to eat things in the Jardin de Luxembourg. Apparently he hadn’t had my number either any more. He did once, but the phone it was on [the only number for him that I did have!] had recently been fried. It was all generally a little bit silly.

So, clearly need to wean myself off the internet-dependency, or failing that, get a phone that has the internet on it, since I clearly cannot cope without it.

Anyway, we went to the lab and I had experiments done on me.

Nerdily, I was delighted that the first thing I saw was the same model of mixer that we use in Pillowfish Headquarters:

Just like home...

I then had experiments done on me in a little booth:

Psycho-acoustic guineapig

Trevor did some work while I did this, although in this photo he is not doing any:

We even played a few tunes in the middle of it to stop my brain dissolving due to the repetitive nature of the tests. Fortunately the room is soundproof so nobody came in to see exactly what part of the research this was supposed to be.

In the evening I went to Sophy’s knitting club with her. We CYCLED to the centre of Paris, me on a Velib which a bike you can just hire and then put back at another hire depot thing. Excellent idea but completely terrifying, especially when at a junction I nearly started riding on the left. But we made it unscathed, apart from mild emotional trauma on my part, and I had a really nice glass of wine and knitted this spectacular piece of … erm, knitting:

My entire night's work

According to Sophy and her knitting-friend, Sabrina, this was a very good first attempt, even though it has holes in and appears to be expanding [I started with 20 stitches and by the time I had done the amount depicted, I had somehow developed 29]. Sophy was planning socks with a knitted space invaders pattern on, and Sabrina produced a small bag with a skull and crossbones pattern knitted into it. I clearly have a long way to go…