Easter mini-Interrail return, day three: York - Toulouse

I do it to myself, really.

When I went to bed last night, I thought I might get up early in the morning to have a crack at walking the city walls, knowing from nice Mr Man of The Pub Recommendation that they open at 8am. When I woke up this morning I considered this plan at great length from the comfort of my bed, and then by about nine had nearly made a decision which warranted a local's opinion.

After talking about it with lovely Olia at reception and negotiating whether I'd be able to do the whole before checkout, I set off for a power-walk clockwise round the walls from Micklegate Bar. People can be interested in all sorts of things so the type of person to get excited about walls would almost certainly be possible to spend several hours walking along them. Indeed, there is a pub crawl (fifteen pubs) that can take many hours if you do it properly.

I had just over an hour and a half in hand, which Olia suggested would be a challenge – one I accepted. On my way to the walls I met the slightly drunken man from Saturday, still celebrating or lamenting a football result, who reckoned he'd done it in about forty-five. It took me just over an hour with occasional stops to look at things and take photographs of walls – mostly round the back of the Minster – and I was obediently back in time to check out and have a coffee with lovely Olia, who, as a victim of circumstance, is now working at reception in a hostel in York and not at home in Kyiv having a cuppa with her feet up.

Check out was at eleven, and my reservation for London was on the 11:58 LNER service, so duly checked and kicked out I wandered to the station via Holy Trinity Micklegate, a bonus church opposite the hostel with a bell outside that one can "ring for peace" using the stones placed on top to strike the bell in the absence of a clapper. I had a quick ding.

At the station, I tried my luck in the first class lounge using my Interrail pass, uncertain whether it'd work as access to lounges appears to be hit and miss. The friendly woman in charge had a look at it as she found me reading the "who can get in" list and ushered me in. I had morning tea instead of coffee because I was in Yarkshire and, well, when in Yark. I justified my choice knowingly to the lovely woman who promptly reminded me they make it in Harrogate, but seemed nonetheless tickled by my having made the effort.

A kindly gentleman named John was sitting in the big comfy seat next to me and we soon started a conversation about my inability to open a Yorkshire Tea sachet and my selection of free stuff (caramel muffin, mmm). When I deployed the puppet for an action shot, and explained that I am perfectly normal and that this was no cause for alarm, he seemed quite excited at the possibility of meeting someone famous while waiting for his train to Aberdeen. I explained that I travel with Puppet in defiance of the art of the selfie, and that as a result I have thousands of near-identical blurry images of a Peruvian finger puppet ruining what would otherwise be perfectly good travel photographs.

I took a photograph of my cup of tea to demonstrate the level of sophistication.

"You're not The Man in Seat 61, are you?" he asked, hopefully.

I thought it best not to lie, and so did my best to let him down gently by confessing that, alas, I am not.

"Oh. Because that would make my day," he added, slightly crestfallen. After some reflection, he twisted the blade, just a little more. "So are you equally famous?"

I suggested that my mother reads it but didn't feel the need to tell him that it's only when I remember to remind her. In fairness, my mother almost certainly doesn't read Seat 61 so I could probably have said yes.

Our conversation about my time in York was genuinely lovely. He hadn't been to the rail museum in many years and was delighted to hear I'd had an exciting time, and then went on to recount stories of having spent many enjoyable hours on trains travelling around Europe in his youth, when he travelled more for work. In his "fitter days", as he put it, he was also a volunteer fireman for one of Norfolk's heritage railways, which sounded fun. I wish we'd been able to speak longer, but they run a tight ship up north and although amused by the idea of having an entire train held for him so we could talk longer, the assistance person came to take him to the 11:56 and I made my way to platform 5a for the 11:58.

A slower, nicer, LNER service was sitting on platform six which I very nearly decided to take after an exchange with its train manager. It was a long Intercity 225 stopping service with old-style burgundy carriages and massively decadent leather seats in first. I asked if his LNER 225 had a nicer first class than the Azuma service I was going to take, and he replied that it did. The seats in the 225 are the same as the seats on the Transport for Wales Premier service – big, leathery armchairs – so perhaps I didn't do myself any favours, but in a moment of stupidity I decided I'd stick with what I'd booked knowing that I'd done it leaving sufficient time at the other end and that I had made a seat reservation with a window seat.

There was someone in seat 25 in coach K when I got to it, but he was very charming about it as he gathered his things to move. In fact, I think he got the better end of the deal, as when I walked through the train later in the journey his carriage was a haven of blissful silence whereas mine had some errant talkers. Still, it went better than the time I unleashed my inner French Karen on someone on a TGV who refused to move for me and so stormed off in a (fabulous) strop to fetch the train manager to turf her out. He looked at my ticket and informed me that while the I had read the coach and seat numbers indicated on my ticket correctly, I had clearly struggled with the longer numbers making up the date. This, just as the doors were closing which, he remarked with a Gallic interpretation of schadenfreude, meant I was travelling without a valid ticket.

I spent the whole of that journey on a strapontin next to a toilet in second, silently fuming. I still am, if I'm honest. Ten years later.

Cuckoo removed, I then found that somebody else had had the sheer audacity to put their bags on the overhead rack above my seat, which I thought was a bit rude. There is a woeful lack of luggage space on modern trains because we're all expected to travel with a mobile phone and a charger and not need a change of clothes, but really. When eventually the culprit got up because they needed something out of it, I pounced like an entitled ninja and asked if I could put my bag over my seat, please, which was awkward as he was from the table of four across the aisle and we still had an hour to go.

I pointedly moved my bag to the rack above my seat, because otherwise it would've had to stay above someone else's seat. And that's not on. But I digress.

There's warm free stuff to be had in first on LNER and from the classy grey and red brunch menu I chose the frittata and "posh baked beans" option which I washed down with a glass of Tempranillo tinto. To follow, I was given a default salted caramel pot – honestly a better proposition than "a choice of apple or banana" – with a coffee to round things up. It was all very civilised indeed and I then had lots of time to peer through the windows and take blurry photos of blurry hedges.

In a fit of madness at King's Cross, I attempted to access the first class lounge to kill the time before crossing the road to Saint Pancras to check in for the Eurostar. There was a moment of mild panic when the man in charge asked me to put my QR code on the reader – flashbacks of Frankfurt – but to my surprise and/or relief the computer said yes, and so in I went. I had a cup of coffee and a different flavoured muffin and a sophisticated glass of fizzy water, then did some very important typing. When I noticed someone putting out some crisps, I had some of them too. Yay! Free stuff.

The Eurostar experience was much as it always is, but I had a new seat number issued at check-in which was not the isolated window seat I'd asked for when I made the reservation. I found my vis-à-vis within wailing distance of a child.

I don't like sitting opposite people I don't know on trains for many reasons but primarily it's because in the absence of clear demarcation you have to be actively apologetic for moving their stuff or kicking their feet out of the way if there's a legroom incursion, so once we were under way I found a lady with a tablet and asked whether I could move if I could find another seat. She didn't fancy my chances much as it was a near-full train and my search was unsurprisingly fruitless, but the next time she walked past she said she'd spoken to the train manager who'd allocated me the special assistance seat in the next coach.

On arrival I discovered, to my horror, another child with toys, but it was travelling with an actual attentive parent who wasn't just playing on their phone but was keeping an eye on said child and giving it thoughtful instruction. I thought parents and children like this were extinct. At one point, the child started watching something on its tablet without headphones and my heart sank, but a quick smiley headphone gesture led to headphones being put on with no objections or whining.

I had so much respect that when said child went to the toilet, I told the accompanying parent how well behaved their daughter was and we were both imbued with fuzzy at the exchange. Either that or I'm now on a list.

The Eurostar free-stuff afternoon lunch-cum-snack was a quinoa salad with courgettes, roasted red pepper, and three tiny but majestic balls of Mozzarella. I had this with a dinky bottle of white, then chomped the almost insultingly tiny pudding thing with a cup of coffee which I had refilled. As I was at a large table I spread it out and really felt that it was missing only a tablecloth to bring it near to a full dining car experience.

We pulled into the Gare du Nord on the dot, as usual, and after some quick street art, I took a sad lonely-person (plus puppet) table in the Bouillon Chartier opposite the Gare de l'Est. I have wanted to eat there for a long time but have never quite got it together, so in planning a journey similar to that of Christmas, had left plenty of time for a meal between trains.

There are three Bouillon Chartier restaurants in Paris and I worked next to the original, which opened in 1896 on the rue du Faubourg Montmartre, for eight years but somehow it eluded me, even if I was forever recommending it to other people. The name comes from a beef stew – a bouillon – which proved so successful that in 1855 the butcher who created it, Pierre-Louis Duval, named his restaurant after it and served one unique dish to the workers in Les Halles, Paris' central fresh food market. The word bouillon then came to mean a cheap workers' eatery or cantine populaire where beef stew was the principal offering on the menu, and around 250 similar establishments soon popped up over Paris.

In 1896 the concept was embraced by two brothers, Camille and Frédéric Chartier, who developed it further and over the course of its history the there have been around fifteen iterations of the enduringly simple concept: “A proper meal for a modest sum”. Now, though, the three restaurants are owned by a group and the menu is a lot more diverse but the traditions – including bustling waiters in black rondins writing down orders on the paper tablecloths, committing them to memory, and then queuing to collect them from the kitchen – remain.

The Bouillon at the Gare de l'Est is the most recent, and opened in 2022 in the style of the original, which is to say faux Belle Époque. There is mostly meat on the menu, but wanting to spare my fellow couchette-dwellers a large bowl of vegetarian spaghetti, I had a simple hard-boiled egg with mayonnaise, leeks with vinaigrette, and a plate of chips. I washed this down with a sad lonely-person's carafe of red wine and finished with a cup of coffee. The service was quick and the bill, expertly calculated on the tablecloth under my nose, came to just over 13€.

During the wait to be served, I bought my métro ticket in the IDF Mobilités app, allowing me to walk from the restaurant straight into the station and then, twenty-or-so minutes later, emerge in the Gare d'Austerlitz ready to locate my train, which, Noodles be praised, had not been cancelled. My bed in a couchette of four came with a welcome kit (earplugs, eye-mask, toothpaste) and an ingenious all-season sleeping bag which had one duvet side and one sheet-only side to allow it to be used all year round, although I did have to ask a grown-up to help me.

In the time between boarding and departing, we got our beds made, put bags in racks or under beds and then made our makeshift train-nests. There were four to each compartment and everyone settled down relatively quickly.

Last time I wanted to do this journey, I ended up having to stay in Paris overnight and there had been some worries at the back of my mind whether there'd be a repeat performance and, if so, how I'd cope with my Interrail pass not being valid for travel from midnight.

We set off on time, and choo-chooed our way into the night.