The plinky-plonky music starts up, and the ride begins to turn slowly. The air is suddenly thick with the delighted squeals of French toddlers. Up above me, Alice is rising and falling gracefully on her mountain lion, and for a few minutes, among the twinkling lights and the soporific music and the gentle spin of the carousel, I actually switch off and lose myself entirely. It’s like my brain fades into sleep mode. It’s actually quite a relief not to have to think about anything for a few minutes.

But then the ride begins to slow, and the music stutters to an end, and I remember that in just a few hours, I will have a huge decision to make. And I have no clue what I should do.

We dismount our charges and wander to a nearby stall to buy hot, sticky Nutella and banana crêpes.

‘So, what d’you reckon to the Manège?’ Alice asks, as we watch the next load of customers pile onto the platform, the children all squabbling over who gets to ride which crazy creature.

‘It was great,’ I say. ‘The perfect start to Christmas Day.’

‘Don’t worry, there is more.’ She pops a slice of banana into her mouth. ‘So. What would you have been doing today if we hadn’t bumped into each other?’

‘Well, I definitely wouldn’t have been sitting in a giant turtle.’ I take a bite out of my own crêpe, managing to smear Nutella across half my face. ‘I don’t know, really. I’d probably be back in the apartment, writing.’

‘Of course,’ she says. ‘How is the writing going?’

If I remember rightly, the writing was going pretty bloody terribly at this point. High on the thrill of seeing Alice again at that first café, I think I’d bigged myself up as something of a budding experimental novelist. I even have a dim recollection of using the term ‘Kafkaesque’ – although I really, really hope I’m misremembering.

The truth is, I spent the past couple of months here starting, and then almost immediately abandoning, a dozen different projects. A TV sitcom script, a dystopian sci-fi story, a truly awful one-man stage play: all of them fell quickly by the wayside.

Paris was supposed to be my last chance to actually give the whole ‘proper writing’ thing a go. And when I failed at it – when I came back to London in January with nothing of any merit on my laptop – it was like a door finally slamming shut in my face. I gave up on that dream right there and then.