Ah, Paris in the sunshine. I love Paris, I love the grand scale of its architecture, I love its sense of space in the big avenues, the style of its inhabitants, I like the sound of heavily accented English spoken to me by pretty Parisian girls in bars (hey, listen, even 'Please could you pass the salt sounds good'), but most of all, I love the French attitude towards food. When you've walked around a Parisian market for a while, or taken a stroll through one of the city's premier food halls, you realize what a set of culinary philistines we Brits can be. We spent an hour or so (and I could happily have remained there half the day) perusing the food halls at Lafayette Gourmet, a vast expanse of upmarket ingredients, ready meals and mini restaurants all under one roof. Now don't get the wrong idea when I say ready meals, for here is not the home of a tired bit of chicken in limp sauce, safely sealed behind plastic and inviting photograph. This is the home of mounds of freshly prepared salads, thirty different kinds, a dozen different tagines, eat here or take home, the beluga caviar and smoked sturgeon bar, stop by for some fish eggs and a shot of purple vodka, an oyster bar, a tiny fresh fish grill seating about 18, jambons and salamis, cheeses - it doesn't just smell, it reeks, utterly fantastic, fruits, chocolate from around the world, do you prefer your 74% from Ivory Coast, Niger or Gambon, I have no idea what the difference is but one day I'm coming back to try the lot. One day, if I ever have the time and money to do it, I want to come and live in Paris for a while, shop every day at Lafayette or the open markets, drink pastis and stub out Gitannes on bar floors, read pretentious sounding literature on the banks of the Sienne, and of course, hope that delightful, husky voiced Parisian girls will ask me to pass the pepper as well.