I went to Paris last week not expecting much. I had been before, more than once, and each time I came home faintly puzzled by the fuss. Pleasant enough, fine food, the obvious sights, but nothing that quite landed. I had written it off as a city that other people loved more than I did, and I was at peace with that. This trip went differently.

The journey out set the tone. I had booked myself onto Eurostar Premium, which is not something I usually do, and it turns out to be a five-star operation from the moment you sit down. Proper service, properly attentive staff, a meal somewhere over Kent that put most short-haul flights to shame. Two and a bit hours later, Gare du Nord. There is something faintly ridiculous about turning up in another country before you would have finished the first leg of a flight, and ridiculous in a good way. I had forgotten that travel could feel like an occasion rather than a tax.

I was there for two days on site with a team I have been consulting with for a while. We had been working together entirely remotely for months, and I would have told you in advance that we had a perfectly good rhythm. We did. But being physically in the room with them rearranged something I had not noticed needed rearranging. Decisions that would have taken three Zoom calls happened standing at a whiteboard for fifteen minutes. People wandered over with half-formed questions instead of putting time in the diary. I caught conversations I would never have been on the invite list for. The work moved at a different pace, not because anyone was working harder, but because the cost of asking dropped to almost nothing. Being in someone’s eyeline turns out to be a feature, not a bug, at least for two days at a time.

None of which has converted me back to the office. I have been remote for nearly a decade. I moved out of London years ago, settled in the north of England, and I am not going back to a commute or a desk policy or the elaborate theatre of looking busy on someone else’s clock. I am pro-remote in the bones, and I expect to die that way. But I had quietly drifted into believing that remote was simply better, full stop, and that is not quite true. In-person has a different texture. It is not nostalgia or productivity theatre to admit that. Some kinds of work, some kinds of trust, settle faster when you are in the room. Knowing that does not mean you should be in the room all the time. It just means it is worth choosing the days you are.

And then there was Paris itself, which I had not expected to enjoy. I had a flat near Sacré-Cœur, where the basilica sat in the window like a poster nobody had quite hung straight. Each morning I walked up the hill before the tour groups arrived, and watched the city assemble itself in the haze below. Each evening I found a café, ordered red wine, and let the world come past. One evening, in the little square near La Bohème on the Butte, a husband and wife duo were working through Aznavour for the people at the tables outside, and when they got to La Bohème itself an elderly woman two tables along sang along, not under her breath but in full and unselfconscious voice, eyes half closed. I sat there longer than I needed to, because there was nowhere I needed to be.

I had not realised how heavy the UK had started to feel until I left it. There is a low hum of anxiety at home at the moment, a sense that things are fraying at the edges and that everyone is waiting for the next thing to go wrong. I had stopped noticing it in the way you stop noticing the fridge until it switches off. Paris was not a fantasy of escape. People there are dealing with their own version of all of it; nobody is having an easy decade. But they were dealing with it while also drinking coffee in the sun, walking dogs, kissing each other on bridges, arguing cheerfully about something or other at the next table over. They were getting on with the business of being alive in a way I had not seen anyone do for a while. Watching that, for a few days, did something to me I cannot quite name.

I came home with the work done, which was the point, and I was glad about that. I came home a little tired, which was also the point. But I came home with something else, smaller and quieter, that I had not been looking for. A reminder that being in the room with people matters more than the calendar makes it feel. A reminder that there are cities in the world that simply carry on, and that you can sit in one of them for a few evenings and stop bracing for impact. A reset, I suppose, that I had not realised I needed.