Monday’s list said Butte aux Cailles, so naturally I went Sunday. A stencilled rat guarding a doorway, and Aydar’s flowering women watching the street from two walls of the thirteenth. All of it in black and white, which is to say, my language.

A postcard collage in a Popincourt gallery, a wall of painted cats, and then the Maison de Victor Hugo, where the man who wrote Les Miserables turns out to have drawn moonlit castles in brown ink better than most of us ever will.

For a few minutes around eight the sun sits inside the Arc de Triomphe and the whole avenue turns to brass. Then home through the metro, where the Picasso museum has hung its rooster over the escalators.

A day of looking through glass. A gallery window near the Palais Royal, a photograph growing a charcoal mountain at the Drawing Lab, and a two metre pink figure guarding a window full of toys.

Yesterday this hill was licensed painters and a queue for portraits. This morning at twenty to eight it was me, a tagged post box and a merry go round standing perfectly still.

Three artists broke into an abandoned bank building on the rue de Rivoli in 1999. The city ended up buying it for them. Today you can walk up through thirty working studios for nothing, and I did.

The painters’ square in Montmartre runs on licences, one square metre each, renewed every year. I went up to see how that works and came back down having photographed nothing but walls.

The graphic art gallery I had walked across Paris for does not open until half past twelve. So I got the street instead, and the street was better.

I stood in an empty white storefront in the Marais and worked out how many drawings would fit on the walls. Then the Bourse de Commerce filled its rotunda with fog and made the sums feel small.

First full day in Paris, out at half five. Trocadero before the crowds, four hours in the Petit Palais, and sixty street artists hung salon style in among the marble.

What the Eiffel Tower’s doorstep looks like at six in the morning in August, before anybody has swept it. Last night’s champagne still lying in the grass, and a floor pattern nobody looks at.

Eight days on the Sorgue done, and a whole day spent getting north. A thank you left on an empty shelf, an hour of somebody else’s piano at Avignon TGV, and Burgundy through a dirty window.

The famous Sunday market at L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, walked from twenty to nine while it was still cool. Rusted chairs, a canal hung with old linen, a wall of masks, and a lesson in selling from a leaflet.

Saturday’s list said one thing, go to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse and find paper. What I got first was a cliff with a castle stuck on top of it, a ruined garden, and a river that comes out of the ground and will not tell you where it has been.

Before the paper mill, the reason the paper mill is there at all. The biggest spring in France coming out from under a cliff, a ruined castle above it, and a poet who moved here to get away from everybody.

An early loop around the town before the shutters went up, which turned into a dog in a doorway, a cat under the postcards and a brocante with nobody in it. By midday the lot of it was in blue biro.

Gordes was the plan. What I got instead was a weir at ten to nine, a dog holding an empty lane on its own, a pavement table of cyanotypes, and the place where the Sorgue splits itself in two.

A day trip to Arles in the middle of the Rencontres. The photographs are not all in the galleries, they are pasted flat on the walls, bolted into a ruined church, and stacked up beside a yellow cafe that has been shut for three years.

The other half of the Arles day, the half spent indoors. Zhang Lanpo’s giant in a Chinese cliff, a Japanese photographer’s children’s book about a dog, and three coloured rectangles that taught me something.

A late note from the same Tuesday. The gallery on the quai keeps its door shut on a Tuesday, which turned out not to matter at all, because the painter was out the front of it.