The day hadn’t got off to a great start. I was flying back to France from the UK after a friend’s funeral. I’d been living in Paris doing a French-language course and living with a host family who, to be honest, weren’t particularly welcoming.
It was late at night when I got back to the apartment, only to find the entrance code to the building had changed – something the host family had neglected to mention. They must have already been in bed, because nobody was answering my calls. Short of throwing rocks at the fourth-floor window to wake them up, I had no way of getting inside.
