All aboard the Clubbing Express

Alex Mattis11 April 2012

The deal is this - you catch any Eurostar travelling after 4pm on Saturday, returning before 10am the following morning, for £35. OK, so there's a catch in there somewhere, but you also save on the cost of a hotel and bah, who needs sleep? Besides, Paris, unlike London, is somewhere you can stay out all night without the hassle of queues, extortionate door taxes or having to pretend you know such-and-such who's the brother of someone-or-other who, like, owns this place, OK?

The fun starts on the train. Or rather, at the Fire Station, a gastropub next to Waterloo, but that's lunch, so that's civilised. Myself and my best girl buddies, Sarah and Helena, board successfully - quite an achievement for us (but now's probably not the time to go into Helena's all-expenses-paid, once-in-a-lifetime trip to Bali and the two-year-out-of-date passport. Or the time Sarah and I missed our flight to Ibiza because we were having such a good time in Butler's Bar at Stansted) - and we start racking up the vin blancs.

For a vehicle known as 'le party train', there's a disappointing lack of stag parties (we're easily pleased) and, more frighteningly, no smoking carriage. But with the Piper-Heidsieck flowing and everyone in that yay-it's-Saturday-night-and-we're-practically-on-holiday mood, our relationship with Steve, Bob and Phil on the adjacent table soon progresses from polite eyebrow-raising to swapping numbers.

Once in Paris, we cab it over to the bar at Hotel Costes. The men are rich, the women stylish. It's packed, it's snooty, it's Fashion. 'Mmm, I love it here,' says Sarah. 'Loads of ugly old men with beautiful women.' Oh, and it's really expensive. 'I'm bored,' she adds, before asking in that tone that once got us all suspended from school, 'Shall we do a runner?' Sadly, were any of us to forge a career in TV, it would be on Sky One's World's Dumbest Criminals, so despite our pleas to the taxi driver of 'Vite! Vite! Don't spare les chevaux!' he stays put and five minutes later Sarah is having her hair pulled out by an irate waitress.

As funny as this is, it seems like a good time to move on, so we go to Sanz Sans in le Bastille. The atmosphere here is young, clubby and loud. But upstairs is quieter - ideal, as we're now in full rant mode. 'E's a blurry bashtard, Sar. Gerridovim!' (Which he has been. His last text to her ended with the words, 'and go on a diet', which as you can imagine, went down like a French kiss at a family reunion.)

So when Steve, Bob and Phil, our Eurostar friends, call to see where we are, we arrange to meet them in the Mecano Bar. This turns out to involve a bit of a wait (remember: no need to do queues in Paris), so we move down to Les Cimes, which... Which I can't remember a thing about. But I know we had seats and wine, so I'm guessing we were happy.

We leave at around 3am to head for a club. Some friends had recommended Globus which is, they said, open til 7.30am, giving us ample time to make our (ouch) 8.07am train. Globus is closed. With no plan -, we go, on the advice of our taxi driver, to Le Queen on the Champs Elys?es. The dancefloor at Le Queen is a writhing mass of sweaty, shirtless Muscle Marys. Outside, a bathrobe-clad trannie in a lopsided Marilyn wig is falling down the steps to the Metro. Six o'clock shadow or no, she's in a better state than we are.

Alex Mattis travelled to Paris courtesy of Eurostar (0870 160 6600)