For a while now there's been a huge amount of restoration of the facades of building in Paris. The most obvious of which is Notre Dame which is almost blindingly white now! Other buildings that are almost complete in their cleaning are the eglise St Eustache, Opéra Garnier, and the Galeries du Grand Palais has not just the stonework, but also the glass and steel latticework completely renovated.

My favourite is pont neuf, which is a bridge I adore. I've no idea why, but I've always felt good about it for some reason. Over the last year or so the restoration work has slowly moved from one end to the other, and you could quite clearly see the spectacular change from rough, worn away stone to a perfectly polished white. This is the oldest bridge in Paris, and seeing it in such a marvelous condition is fantastic.

They've virtually finished, it, with just the final span underway. You probably can't see in this photo, but there were real stonemasons carving the faces on the side. I'd imagined that some machine would have done it these days, but apparently (and fortunately) not!

Finally, there are two long awaited changes, but I'm not sure whether either has really happened. Firstly, the Musée de l'Orangerie at the end of the Tuileries are supposed to be open again. This was a building custom built for Monet's Water Lillies, or possibly the other way round (Monet painted the Lillies for the Orangerie), but whichever the whole point was that Monet knew the paintings would be on the walls of an oval room lit by natural light from above. Unfortunately, even though the walls were oval, somebody forgot to put windows in the ceiling.Six(?) years ago they started reconstruction work to add that naturally lit ceiling. They also decided to add a tourist shop in the basement, and unfortunately discovered an ancient wall that hadn't been on the plans. All sorts of delays were caused by that, and put the whole thing back a year (or more?). Apparently the museum is now open again, although I haven't seen this for myself yet.

The second change is the Tour St Jacques, near the Place du Chatelet. Ever since I moved to France, some five years ago, it has been permanently covered by scaffolding and tarpaulins. I've never seen a workman on the tower, and it's been in a state of suspended animation for the entire time.

Well, the other day it looked like this. Maybe work has started on it at last! Or maybe the tarpaulins were just too dirty and had to be changed...