We went to Paris at very short notice a weekend or two ago, and one of our main aims was to snap a picture of the FIA headquarters. Yes, fine, people go to Place de la Concorde for the history and the beauty, but we went for the F1. Obviously.

Anyway, it was a brilliant trip, but there were just a few tips I wanted to share with the class.

1. Don’t wait until morning to think about climbing the Eiffel Tower.

Actually, we weren’t that keen on climbing having seen both the queue and the height of the thing. It’s a long way up, don’t you know!

2. When travelling by the Metro, make sure you know where you’re going.

For a minute, I thought we were going to travel across Paris one stop at a time. Actually, it was brilliant fun trying to navigate the underground system in a different language. We bought twice as many tickets as we required, kept surfacing when we didn’t quite need to, and struggled to get through the ticket barriers. I particularly loved the double decker trains, as there was so much space for passengers. Highly recommended.

3. When on a river cruise, don’t turn into Peter Kay and try charades as communication.

Apparently our waiter didn’t know what a cocktail was. How would you try and mime that?

4. Bring a map.

Navigating the crazy traffic in Paris is much harder when you only have a distant photo of a pedestrian map to work with.