Paris...the ugly truth

I'd never been to Paris before, writes News Blogger Ben Bentley. Shropshire rugby fans brought me here ­on a mission: to be among them, to be part of the party.

Oh, and what a party...I must thank county supporters in the French capital for the hospitality they showed me. I will never forget them. In Paris we met up, had a few drinks and dreamed a dream.

My particular thanks go to Tom Carver and his pals from Telford who showed me what true Bulldog spirit is.

Their car broke down halfway en route to the final in Paris but they were simply unstoppable, commissioning a hire car and driving on like nothing else mattered apart from being there. In front of the big screen they were among the bandleaders of the party, beginning wave after wave of song and celebrations.

I only wish I'd been as lion-hearted as them now and worn my Superwoman suit, but it was in the wash.

My bulldog spirit didn't quite match up to Tom and the boys. Okay, with a rail and Metro strike in full swing I walked the best part of 15 miles to meet them, but my heroics were quickly tarnished.

We arranged to meet by the Eiffel Tower and despite mobile phone calls back and forth between Tom and I from just yards apart, it would be around an hour-and-a-half before we finally embraced and he and his band of merry men would offer up fine whiskey to my lips courtesy of Salopian goodwill and several silver hip flasks.

At one point during the farcical series of phone calls he told me to walk 20 metres to my left, 15m to my right and 10 straight ahead ­ and I ended up standing in a flower bed. Something a group of South Africans found enormously funny.

Funny? I wanted to tell them all about how this was nothing by English comedy standards and how they should purchase the Chuckle Brothers back catalogue if they wanted more of this kind of quality gear.

Prior to our meeting, an hilarious exchange (if you were anyone else but me) between myself and what seemed like almost every single one of the 10.000 England fans assembled in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower went something like this: "Have you seen a Beefeater, a Jonny Wilkinson Superman and Batman?" (This was how they were dressed, see.)

People began to ignore me after a while.

Earlier I had 10,000 friends happy to hug me and shake my hand; now I was alone and loneliness is never more lonely than when there are 10,000 people walking past you and shooting you looks that say: "The French St John Ambulance can be found about a mile the road ­ they have a really good mental health wing too."

It would be daft while in the most romantic city on the planet not to have a mooch around, but I wondered whether even Juliette Binoche can be romantic if she's on her own.

At the end of the rugby final all my friends had gone home, back to Shropshire, and now I really was alone. So I had a wander around to see what was so great about Paris.

The first thing you notice is how well dressed the skateboarders are. None of your trousers-round-yer-bum cheek chic; ­ the girls wear Dior and smart shoes; the boys wear as much corduroy as you can get on a boy.

And they do the flick-flack like they don't care, riding down railings like it's an accident.

With the public transport strike in full inertia at a time when the rugby had brought an extra city of supporters, travelling was a nightmare. The only thing for it was to walk everywhere.

I walked across the city many many times, and began to feel like a vagrant with a three-star hotel. I wanted a skateboard.

I happened, while wandering endlessly around the Parisian Walkways, upon Opera, an up-market cowbag area of the city where the shops are Gucci and Givenchy and there's not a Greggs to be seen. I was in the wrong place if I was expecting a Cornish pasty or for that matter a corn plaster for my feet, which by now had started to bleed like a pair of jam doughnuts in sling-backs.

But walking is the way to see this city. In Opera I saw someone who looked like someone, but then everyone looks like everyone else in Opera: the same fixed smile, the same face paint that wasn't a patch on the rugby fans DIY efforts.

I thought I saw Gerard Depardieu, or it could have been just an ugly French bloke. I wanted to ask him if, perchance, he was Monsieur Depardieu but I began to wonder whether the question bore some kind of inverted insult. Ask yourself the same question and let me know how you'd feel.

On the streets of Paris, to take my mind off my blistered feet I played a mental game of 'Ugly-Beautiful', a game that I had made up out of boredom based on a format mixture of Miss World, Mr Universe and television's Mr and Mrs.

In my game of Ugly-Beautiful, the women won hands down. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder ­ and I had forgotten to put my contact lenses in ­ but it says something about a city, described as one of the most romantic on earth, that the women are beautiful and the men are ugly in a way that makes you laugh.

That Paris itself is beautiful is a non-negotiable truth, though. I went on a bateaux mouche, a river boat that wendled its way along the Seine from one end of the city to the other: Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, Le Louvre, I saw them all. Unlike some Oriental tourists who just videoed it and will see Paris for the first time when they get back home.

When the trains started working (the day after the Rugby World Cup final, ho-ho-ho) I also noticed that people don't smell in Paris. Not even on the Metro when they put their armpits in your face.

Even their dogs don't smell like dogs. I stroked one and smelt my hand afterwards. It smelt like Jean Paul Gaultier.

Memories are made of this. It was my first time in Paris, and what a way to see it - by seeing not only a city of charming Parisians and their little dogs but a load of Shropshire in the city at the same time.

I came to Paris alone - and immediately found tens of thousands of new friends. If I bump into them when I'm 70 we will remember the night when we were nearly heroes.

Paris is a magical city full of the romance of a fairy-tale, but the happy ending will not begin until I arrive back in a beautiful part of England called Shropshire.

I must say that trawling for county people as part of my mission in Paris revealed some cavernous holes in other people's geographical knowledge. "Where's Shropshire?" came the response with alarming regularity. "Is it near Milton Keynes?"

In the end I told them that, yes, it was. You don't want idiots in Britain's best kept secret anyway.

Ben Bentley was in Paris to cover the build-up to the Rugby World Cup Final.