It is Wednesday night, or should I say, very early on Thursday morning. I have to travel to the 13th arrondissement in the morning to enrol à la fac. Not only am I leaving the soirée early, held in various bars throughout the Latin Quarter, I am able to walk home. This is the first time in my life I have been able to do this. It is around half midnight; I wave to my friends as they try to make the last RER home at the Luxembourg station.

Le Rostand is being polished into place, ready for the customers' morning cafés in a few hours' time, while the staff contemplate how much longer the final clients' cognacs can last. Tourists, arm in arm stroll by the locked Jardin de Luxembourg in awe at the simply beautiful photographs on the railings. There are plenty of joggers out and the thought of why there are so many at this time in the evening keeps me occupied on the ten minute walk home. It is balmy, maybe around 18 degrees celsius and I kick myself one more time for putting on such an unnecessary coat on my way out the door at 8 o'clock. I cannot believe it is the 27th of September; the calmness of midnight should be May or June.

Today, as I came back from the cinéma on the Boulevard St Germain and crossed over the place St Sulpice, with a spring in my step which can only be described as parisien (the marvels to be savoured other than the church itself included a man peeing against a tree), the ground was covered in bronze.

I may be fooled so easily, but the seasons are not.