I used to think that if I was blind and deaf I'd know I was in a French city because of the aroma of burnt dark tobacco and the occasional wafts of exotically accented, garlicky air. But not this time. Over in Paris with my 12-year-old daughter Rose for the week-end, I thought: this place smells just like London.

Memories came flooding back, some of them painful. I lived there for the year of 1977. It could've been a life -- a relationship with the French, Paris, the whole expatriate thing -- but in the end I headed north again. Unlike Edith Piaf, though, I have regrets, exquisite regrets. Doesn't everyone, really? I remembered lying in bed somewhere in the fifth with a dark Sorbonne student from Besançon called Odile, and her murmuring for no reason I can now remember "je suis tres olfactoire, tres, tres olfactoire'" Trying saying that in English. It just doesn't sound the same.

I noticed some changes. Parisiennes are still fabulous and vacant looking in their neat, figure-hugging 'pulls', but they've given up drinking wine -- preferring now to drink beer straight from the neck of a bottle like the rest of European yoof -- and are apparently no longer keeping slim with Gitanes and Gauloises, but with Marlboro Lights. And the whole place seemed cleaner. Civic ordonnances and high powered water jets have removed peeling urban dirt and the generations of political graffitti and flyposters that gave Paris its farouche, distinctly Gallic, edge. Suddenly, at least on the Left Bank (the older of the two in terms of human settlement, by the way) this is a honey-coloured city. But somehow you can't imagine a future Ho Chi Minh working as a plongeur in the kitchens down here. It's all too respectable. And as for the Boul' Mich', my God, it's been well and truly seduced and subdued by Gap, Disney and 'McDo'.

For all that, there was still a magic in the air. I'm an infrequent and reluctant visitor to department stores, but Rose likes shopping, so we went to the Galeries Lafayette on Haussmann, and I was bowled over by the backlit fin de siècle stained glass opulence of its slightly ridiculous central dome. And in the high fashion sportswear department I found a 'pull marin aux boutons épaules' -- I used to wear them when I lived there -- but it was sixty quid, so I moved quickly on. The deal with Rose was that if I went shopping, she had to come to the high Gothic masterpiece of all time, La Sainte Chapelle, on the Ile de la Cité. It's what made Paris the centre of the mediaeval universe -- eight glorious stained glass panels rising fifty feet, supported by a gilded forest of delicate arches in a basement chapel beneath. When I saw it I got tingles down my neck, and it shut us both up.

I saw none of this when I lived there. Apart from watching cult movies in Jim Haynes' basement on the rue de la Tombe Issoire, taking drugs in Courbevoie with models from Dior, and falling head over heels in love with someone who promptly left me with herpes for an American who claimed (falsely, I'm sure) to have played bongos on Van Morrison's latest album, what on earth was I doing?

Rose and I went to the Jardins de Luxembourg and sat and fed croissants to tame sparrows, stared at shops in the rues de Seine and du Bac, and ate falafel in the rue des Rosiers in the Marais. In the eastern part of the fifth we made a great discovery - the Arènes de Lutèce. Near the charming Place de la Contrescarpe, and just off the Rue Monge, here lie the remains of a second century Roman arena -- the largest in the transalpine empire and capable of seating 17,000, still extant and much unvisited. We climbed over the revetements and terraces. A few kids kicked a football around on the flat sandy earth of the arena. In the space where gladiators and wild animals once awaited their fate, a teenage goalkeeper now stood.

On Saturday lunchtime we went to the Place Paul Painleve to meet old friends of my wife Julia's family. There was Olivia, who lives in London during the week, her cousin Laurance, and her mother, Odile, a redoubtable lady, now towards the top end, I suspect, of her ninth decade. Some time in 1938 in Paris, Odile's older sister, Andrée, introduced Julia's mum, the beautiful, fiery Anne Darlington (the dedicatee, incidentally, of AA Milne's Now We Are Six) to her dad, Peter Ryde, an elegant, sensitive man who went on to be, for forty years, The Times' golf correspondent. Neither Andrée nor Anne lived long - Andrée died during or just after the war, and Anne lived only till 1958 -- but the connection goes deep, and there was a sense, when Odile met Rose, that she was shaking the hand of Peter and Anne's grand-daughter. Odile's childhood friend Colette was there too. Bright as buttons were these two Parisian ladies. Odile talked about a haunted house she'd once had in Sussex which had wonderful plaster mouldings on the ceilings (pastries, she called them) and Colette told me how her son, a cardiologist, had just gone to London to take over from Magdi Yacoub. I was impressed.

I calculated that Odile and Colette had known each other since 1918 and it seemed a good idea to get a picture of them together with Rose. So we opened the full height, double doors of the living room and the three of them stepped onto a balcony that overlooks the oldest secular building in Paris (the fourteenth century Palais de Cluny, which was itself built into the site of the second century Roman baths) and the main building of the Sorbonne.

It was only a matter of time before I started to look at property prices. These days, count on paying Ffr 35,000 (that's £3,500 or $5,250) per square metre and you need 70 metres carre minimum (two bedrooms) for a good place. Long live the revolution.