09.40 The train draws into Paddington and I'm off to get the Tube to St Pancras. The five-stop journey on the Circle Line, with its regular delays at Edgware Road, could prove tricky. In fact, I'm there in no time at all, though the recorded announcement - "Alight here for national rail services" - is yet to acknowledge St Pancras's new international status.
10.05 I'm at St Pancras a full hour before my departure, and, with a flexible ticket, I might even have been able to transfer to an earlier train. As it is, I've plenty of time to admire this great temple to travel. At the platform-side Champagne bar people are necking bubbly like 1920s aristos about to embark for Constantinople.
10.25 Straightforward check-in, customs clearance and security - no nonsense with water bottles or belt removing - followed by a half-hour wait in the comfortable lounge. Then it's time to board and a moving ramp leads us up towards the light. It's a bit like that scene in Spielberg's Close Encounters, except that we end up not on a spaceship but on the platform beneath the gasp-inducing iron and glass shed roof.
11.05 Comfortable seats. Luggage space galore. This is travelling. We slip smoothly out of the station on High Speed 1, the newly completed £5.8 billion rail link, and as we slip underground, accelerating, it occurs to me we're among the very first people ever to have travelled at this speed across the capital. Then we're crossing the blur that is Kent, briefly running alongside the M2 near Rochester at an optimum 186mph to leave its sorry traffic for dust. After just 55 minutes, we emerge from the Tunnel onto French soil, and noon becomes 1pm.
13.30 Lunch, a cardboard tub of excellent mushroom and chestnut pasta (£4.50) from French caterers Fleury Michon knocks First Great Western sandwiches for six.
. Or even in all the Ryanair flights from anywhere that go to Paris, I suspect.
(ie piss off to the next stopover town, get the B&B room sorted and set camp in the nearest coffeeshop)
