Paris

I arrived at Paris Charles de Gaulle on a Thursday afternoon on an Air France flight from New York — business class upgrade, which meant I was already slightly drunk on champagne before we crossed the Atlantic and arrived feeling like a person of consequence. The RER B from CDG to Châtelet–Les Halles takes 35 minutes and costs €11.80, and I've taken it so many times now it feels like arriving home. From Châtelet I took the Métro Line 7 two stops to Pont Marie on Île Saint-Louis, dropped my bags at the Hôtel de Lutèce — a small, beautiful 23-room hotel in a 17th-century building where the owner knows my name and the breakfast croissants are from the boulangerie directly across the street.

I've spent three weeks in Paris three separate times now and the city reveals itself differently every visit. This time I had an agenda: no tourist queues, no compromises. First morning I walked the Marais before the shops opened — Rue de Bretagne, Place des Vosges at 7am when the arcades were empty and the light came through the chestnut trees at a low slant. I had a café crème and a pain au chocolat at Café de Bretagne, which has been there since 1900 and shows no signs of updating anything, which is exactly the point.

The Louvre I did properly — booked the first entry slot at 9am on a Wednesday, walked straight past the Mona Lisa crowd to the Mesopotamian antiquities on the ground floor, which I had almost entirely to myself. I spent three hours with the Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo and still felt I'd rushed. The Musée d'Orsay across the river I visited at the end of the same day and stood in front of Monet's water lilies in the Orangerie until my feet ached.

Montmartre I visited twice — once for the Sacré-Cœur at sunrise (take the funicular, not the stairs, at that hour), and once for an evening in the narrow streets around Place du Tertre where I ate dinner at Le Moulin de la Galette, a proper brasserie in an actual windmill, steak frites and a carafe of Côtes du Rhône. I walked home down the hill at midnight via Rue Lepic and felt like a character in a Truffaut film.

For food I kept a list. The best croissant: Du Pain et des Idées on Rue Yves Toudic, plain not almond. The best steak tartare: Septime on Rue de Charonne, booked three weeks in advance and worth every email. The best street food: a falafel from L'As du Fallafel in the Marais, eaten standing on Rue des Rosiers with tahini dripping down my wrist. The best tasting menu: Guy Savoy at the Monnaie de Paris, a river view, caviar butter, artichoke soup with black truffle — two Michelin stars and three hours of my life I'd give anything to relive.

I took the Eurostar to London for one night midway through, just because I could — 2 hours 20 minutes from Paris Gare du Nord to London St Pancras, through the Channel Tunnel, which never gets less surreal. Came straight back the next evening.

Third week I rented a vélib' bicycle — Paris's excellent bike-share scheme — and did the Canal Saint-Martin from Bastille to La Villette, about 5km of tree-lined waterway with locks and iron footbridges. I sat at a café on Rue de la Grange aux Belles with a kir royale watching the barges go by and wrote in my journal for two hours. One afternoon I took the RER C to Versailles — 40 minutes, €3.65 — and walked the gardens for four hours, genuinely overwhelmed by the scale of human vanity on display.

I left from CDG on an evening flight, check-in at Terminal 2E, a final café au lait and a croque-monsieur from Paul in the departure hall. Paris doesn't say goodbye so much as it waits for you to come back.