If this be Thursday, I must be on my way to Paris. There is nothing quite like Paris to rejuvenate the ageing follicles, to warm the blood, and dispel instantly even the most insidious symptoms of the dreaded taedium vitae. It is a city where a glimpse of stocking was never, ever shocking and where, in any walk of life, just anything goes.
Take for example the poet and writer, Gerard de Nerval. The most famous walk of his life was the occasion when he was discovered taking his lobster for a stroll at the end of a lead in the gardens of the Palais Royal.
"I have a liking for lobsters!" the flamboyant eccentric pleaded in his self-defence: "They are serious, peaceful creatures, savent les secrets de la mer" (privy to the secrets of the sea). Which brings me to the point that a lobster's life has more variety than one might think.
It used to be thought that the ocean bed was flat and featureless, a smooth container for the surplus water of the Earth. But around the middle of the last century, when it was decided to lay a telegraphic cable across the North Atlantic, its topography became a matter of some practical importance.
By repeatedly paying out miles of weighted cable until it reached the bottom, the scientists of the day discovered that the Atlantic Ocean was shallower in the middle than it was at either side; they named the shallow region in the centre "Telegraph Plateau" to commemorate the great endeavour which led to its discovery.
But further surprises lay in store. The invention of echo-sounding in the early 1920s showed that Telegraph Plateau was not the gentle rise and fall of ground it seemed to be, but a massive mountain range, much longer and more rugged than anything on land.
It ran down the entire length of the Atlantic, its highest peaks breaking through the surface of the water to become islands such as Ascension, the Azores and Tristan da Cunha. So in 1925 they renamed it the "Mid-Atlantic Ridge".
But later soundings showed that the ridge was not confined to the Atlantic. It curves around Africa and moves up the western side of the Indian Ocean to Arabia, while part of it curves southwards around Australia and New Zealand to perform a majestic whirl in the Pacific.
And it was not a perfect ridge at all; it has a deep canyon running along its crest throughout its entire length, a canyon which, with understandable hyperbole, has come to be called the Great Global Rift.