Moaning in my last post about the pitfalls of daily life abroad harked me back to the unpleasant business of expectation. Expecting that everything abroad is plum, that is, when in fact it’s sometimes plain old bran, or even, at times, off mustard. Which leads me to Dijon.

I’ve spent more than a few nights in Towns of Death, Europe, and Dijon, France was one of them.

Possibly better known as the Home of Dijon Mustard, the town itself was quite pretty in parts and I was pottering about one Friday night some time back with my mate Kylie. Our choice of entertainment was restricted to a theatre called ‘des Abbattoir’ and what looked like a rollerblading convention for over-70s in the town square.

Our hostel was supposedly in a state of mid-restoration, but ‘throes of demolition’ might have been a more apt term. The wallpaper was on the floor and the carpet on the ceiling, and our room (and the toilets and showers, for that matter) had no lights, and was the smallest broom closet in the darkest corner of the furthest corridor of the longest building. Not a single employee spoke English and all looked like they’d just stepped off the set of the Addams Family.

We offloaded our packs, creating a few new and satisfyingly gaping holes in the walls in the process, threw ourselves onto our bunks and nibbled dejectedly on the disappointingly deflated croissants we’d purchased earlier in the day, pondering what could possibly have possessed the interior designers to choose such a particularly confronting shade of psychedelic blue.

But we didn’t scale the pinnacle of true dejection until the dessert we’d splurged on thinking it was cheesecake turned out to be custard tart: woe is us.