Paul Thomas: Steak costs a fortune but you can see the great masters for nothing

In Europe, swine flu is something that happens to swine and smoking-related illness is something that happens to other people.

Pairs of heavily armed policemen, easily distracted by pretty girls, patrol the airports and large railway stations. Otherwise security seems as approximate as when we were last there, pre-9/11. (The Americans, by comparison, took the opportunity to photograph and fingerprint us during our two-hour stopover in Los Angeles, although technically we didn't set foot on US soil.)

Paris does, however, have gendarmes on roller-blades. One hopes this isn't just a public relations gimmick, but to this perhaps jaundiced eye they looked as if they were in training for a guest appearance at Sydney's gay and lesbian Mardi Gras.

In a second-hand book stall beside the Seine, Fais Gaffe Poupee (Be Careful, Doll) by Rupert Staircase perches among early editions of Sartre and Camus and yellowing copies of high-brow cinema magazines, its lurid cover standing out like "a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake" in Raymond Chandler's memorable line.

In the Loire Valley we restricted ourselves to one chateau: Chenonceau near the town of Amboise where Leonardo da Vinci spent his final years. I wouldn't go so far as to say that when you've seen one chateau, you've seen them all, but traipsing around vast historic buildings can have a numbing effect.

Chenonceau, it almost goes without saying, is magnificent, but its history is pallid compared to that of Vaux-le-Vicomte further north. In 1641 Nicolas Fouquet, Louis X1V's superintendent of finances, bought a small castle which he converted into the finest chateau and gardens in France. When the makeover was complete, he held an enormous fete at which the Sun King was the guest of honour.

Infuriated to discover that his finance minister was living in greater splendour than he was, Louis threw Fouquet into prison for the rest of his life. For a time his prison valet was the man in the iron mask who was fictionalised by Alexandre Dumas in The Three Musketeers series and whose identity remains a source of fascination for historians.

Having made his point, Louis rubbed it in by recreating Vaux-le-Vicomte on a grander scale in the form of the palace of Versailles.

The Loire was the scene of the only glitch on the entire trip. Our hire car deal, which seemed too good to be true, promised a sporty little Audi. Of course it was too good to be true: instead of the Audi we got a Renault Kangoo, a conveyance - "car" seems too generous a term - which manages the difficult feat of being as ugly as its name suggests.

We enjoyed a week of glorious sunshine in St Remy de Provence where Vincent Van Gogh painted some of his most famous works, including The Starry Night, while confined to the local mental hospital. If you have to be institutionalised, St Remy is as good a place as any.

We stayed with friends who farm in the Alkham Valley near Folkestone in southeast Kent. After an absence of several decades, buzzards once again hover above the valley. Our host put it down to conservation efforts rather than global warming.

At a dinner party we met a man who can legitimately claim to be a dentist to the stars: he does Kate Moss and had spent the morning treating Barry "Dame Edna Everage" Humphries who'd jetted in from New York for a few hours to have his teeth seen to.

As you would expect, we ate well in France, although I ordered badly at an auberge in Limeray and found myself recoiling from a lump of offal bearing an unnerving resemblance to a human brain. We also ate well in England: Italian and Vietnamese in London and English - a Romney lamb pie - at a pub tucked away in deep countryside overlooking the Kentish Downs.

You can't obsess about the cost of things or the exchange rate otherwise you'd ruin your holiday and go slightly mad, but I couldn't help noticing that fillet steak was £49.95 ($121.82) a kilo at an Edwardian butcher in Portobello Rd. On the other hand, at the Tate Modern you can view works by Warhol, Dali, Man Ray, Miro and Lichtenstein for absolutely nothing.

Having seen no mention of New Zealand outside the sports pages for a month, a headline in the Guardian the day before we left announced the "death of the Southern Hemisphere". This timely warning turned out to refer to the extinction of plant, marine and animal species.

The coffee at Wellington Airport at 8am on a Saturday morning was better than any we had in Europe.