OUR MAN IN PARIS

The London son is in France this week on a course in a lovely chateau somewhere outside Paris. It's the "somewhere" that seems to be causing problems. He'd been told that a taxi from the Eurostar station in the city to the hotel would take 45 minutes and would cost £140. So, as usual with this type of excitement, his dad and I clock-watched, until in our minds, we'd got him safely installed at the chateau. At 10pm, an hour after our ETA  I received a text: "Still in taxi. Driver lost. "  Everything went through my mind, especially as the text seemed to trail off with the word "French".  Was the driver a maniac - had he murdered our son - should I phone the chateau? In the end, the journey took more than two hours - longer than a flight from London to Paris would have lasted, had he opted to fly (which as it turned out he couldn't have done as all Parisian airports were closed due to a storm alert).