I work in Versailles, famous for the Palace of Versailles, and home to such now-headless luminaries as Marie Antoinette and Louis XIV. It doesn’t really mean a lot to me except in the evenings when I’m explaining to the dizzy tourists on the platform that yes this train does in fact go back to Paris.

I hang out in a cafe on the market square called Aux Rendex-Vous des Touristes. As a result of the name of course, the tourists stay away in droves, and this is actually where all the locals hang out. Either this name is a crass branding error or a shrewd attempt at niche marketing.

From here I watch all the Versaillaise wives, while their CEO husbands are away at work. With their flat tummies and their kids frolicking through the dazzling flower gardens. It makes me sad to see this sometimes. These women. How perfectly easy their lives must be. I don’t even think they are living, any more than someone floating downstream on a gilded boat could be said to be swimming. Only those who struggle to live, truly live. Then again I guess, they are engaged in that most noble profession of raising a child, and who am I anyway.

Their teenage kids in black gangsta-rap t-shirts, sneakily bum-puffing cigarettes railsliding along the gutters.

The mums down at the pool, keeping their heads perked up out of the water like periscopes so as not to mess up their blowdryed ‘dos.

When you look at maps of Versailles, you immediately realise that this affluent city owes it’s everything to the Palace. The entire city sprawls towards it, indicates it. It’s like a naked woman standing in the shape of a star, and all the shapes, the shadows, the ripples of her muscles and the tautness of her tendons lead your vision toward her sex.

So between lessons this one day I headed down there, to the Palace. I crunched over the gravel, kind of looked around. There was no guard around the back so I was able to head down to the gardens for free. Cool.

To be honest all the statues lolling about the place don’t thrill me that much. There’s so many that well they just all blur into dullness. It’s like after you’ve had sex for the sixth time in the same night, eventually you don’t even feel it.

OK, so it’s not as though I’ve ever had sex six times in the one night, but I can extrapolate.

But one amazing thing is the Grand Canal. The geometric plane that just lays in the perfectly manicured lawn and the colonnade of perfect trees. And the tourists on their boats sunk into that silver plane shrinking away into perspective. Beyond the canal and the flawless green of the lawn behind it, you just want to get lost in the geometry until you reach the imagined dimension beyond parallel where everything shrinks to a point.

And then what should happen, I got tempted into the labyrinth. There was this lovely statue of Bacchus, the Greek God from where we get that great English word, bacchanalia. He was lolling on a huge mountain of rich coal-purple grapes. The golden baby fawns that surrounded him were gorging themselves and feeding each other. Their little uncircumcised golden penises stuck out everywhere. There were some busts, I do like busts. A beautiful little amphitheatre. To think of what must have gone on in there over time. None of the fountains were working. This is typical of the French. All the tourists pay a shit-load of money but fuck them we won’t turn on the fountains.

Its not that the individuals in Paris are bad at all, it’s just in crowds they piss me off. In queues at McDonalds, at the pool, at the train station. But then again, crowds everywhere piss me off.

But there is evidence of a general lack of respect and hospitality everywhere here. In the art galleries, even the supposedly international storehouse of Le Louvre, everything is written purely in French. Except for the NO SMOKING signs, or KEEP OFF THE GRASS, or DON’T TOUCH THE EXHIBITS. These signs are written in more languages than I can even recognise.

Now this hedge garden wasn’t so labyrinthine really, and I had to get back to work soon. But I just thought I’d go and check out the twinkling of water I could see through the trees first ; then there was Allee de Bacchus so I had to check that out, I do love Bacchus; then a big line of people was heading through to somewhere and they had an English guide I could eavesdrop in on ; then this place sounds nice ; then what’s that flash of gold I can see ? Then when I turned to hurry back to work, there turned out to be all this construction everywhere, and all the paths had been cordoned off, and moats had been dug, and didn’t I just come down this path?, and the plumbing was all ripped up, and big yellow machinery tearing at the soil, and I got myself completely tangled and I couldnt get the fuck back out again.

I have used some really bad excuses for being late in my day. Gina and I once blamed not changing our clocks for Daylight Saving. Unfortunately it was autumn, and we hadn’t done our maths correctly. In fact, had our story been true we would in fact have been an hour early.

Thank God for the unreliability of the London Underground, on whose broad shoulders I have laid the blame for being late on an uncountable number of occasions. And if there was a Tube strike, well I mean I didn’t even get out of bed.

Thank God for the common cold. I have in the past called in sick from the front steps of a Spanish nightclub, and from the shores of a stunning burnished lake in the Lakes District.

But this time I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t tell her the truth. I had to lie. Unoriginally, I blamed the trains. I am not the Mad Hatter, and my boss is not the Queen of Hearts. If she was, perhaps I could have considered doing it, I could have considered holding my shoulders back, looking her in the eye, and explaining that this time the reason I am late is that I got lost in a hedge maze.