It was 1am and we were just leaving dinner at a friend’s house behind Montmartre. We were tired, but the taxi we’d called for never appeared. So we headed down to the main road to try to hail a cab, along with a number of other stragglers now wishing, like us, they’d kept Metro hours.

Within minutes, several men had urinated in plain sight very near to us; one had clambered up on a little raised platform with some shrubbery on it just to do so.

Nearby, a woman yelled in French “You’re no better than beasts!” but the beasts took no heed. Faced with this scene, not a taxi in sight, we walked the three-and-a-bit miles back to our flat. This was Paris in 2016.