At the age of 16, Paris hit me with a sucker punch: Sartre and beautiful women with boyish haircuts carrying poodles, policemen in capes, booksellers on the Seine, Courbet and Gèricault in the galleries. I'd just read The Outsider and Down and Out in Paris and London and I was a pushover for Paris and have remained hopelessly besotted ever since.
What actually did it for me was breakfast. My father had installed us in a pension in the rue St André des Arts. Every room looked as if it had been decorated by Colette and cleaned by Edith Piaf. Breakfast was a baguette with butter and jam and milky coffee. Unexceptional, just like breakfast at home. Except that it was utterly exceptional.
The bread had an eggshell crust and a soft white centre that smelt of comfort. It wasn't the white steamed ready-sliced stuff of home. The butter was as pale as death and had a creamy sweetness that was a thousand taste buds from the sputum-yellow over-salted stuff I was used to.
The jam was thin and formed pools in the butter and tasted intensely of strawberries, not the thick, livid red anonymous fruit of England. The coffee tasted of that particular French combination: hot, with milk and chicory. The apparent familiarity was what made the reality so astonishing. If the French had eaten herons' tongues and can-can dancers' sequins for breakfast, I would have been excited but not shocked.
I realised that all my life I'd been eating a pale, sad shadow and that the food in England was a horrid charade compared to this. This was perhaps the most important breakfast of my life. It was the beginning of a lifelong adoration for food.
This is an edited extract from AA Gill's Here & There: Collected Travel Writing (£12.99, Hardie Grant Books), published on 17 November. British Airways flies to Paris. Visit ba.com.
