Is it just ME?

Or are city breaks no break at all?

HELL is other holidaymakers. We imagine Paris, Venice, Rome, New York as they are in vintage postcards. Sepiatinted, deserted at dawn. Just a few locals in crisp linens and a flock of picturesque pigeons. The trouble is: photographs lie.

It is with horror that we arrive at the Louvre to discover a queue snaking towards the Tuileries. Is the Mona Lisa really worth it? we ask, using a Lonely Planet guide for shade.

Lonely Planet? Don’t make me laugh. Madding Planet, more like. Paris’s gothic cathedral Notre Dame is as tranquil as a pinball machine. Lucky Quasimodo the Hunchback who had a bell tower to himself. On a busy day — and what day isn’t? — it can take an hour to get through the doors.

The determined city breaker is up with the lark, grabbing a croissant on the way to the Grand Palais. Dismay, then, when, having flogged herself out of bed, earlier than on an office day, she turns the corner to discover that 200 others had the same idea.

A friend came back from a Bank Holiday in Barcelona and carried on as if she’d survived the Somme.

You could say it was ever thus. Claude Monet complained in the 1900s about the gawping tourists who looked over his shoulder as he painted Venice. He would weep to see St Mark’s Square today, mobbed by millions. For centuries, Venice was ‘La Serenissima’. Not so serene now.

If you’ve spent more time queuing than actually seeing the place you have so patiently, hotly, foot-sorely queued for, the mini-break balance is wrong.

No one loves un monument historique more than me. But sometimes, as I wilt in the file for the Centre Pompidou, I do daydream of a garden in England and the virtue of staying at home.

You spend more time queuing than actually seeing the place you’ve foot-sorely queued for