To slice two-thirds from this is a trivial matter, at least for those with time to spare. Apr?le hypermarch?British visitors are rediscovering la plage – so says Robin Wilkins, the managing director of SeaFrance: “The French have all the sand and we’ve got all the shingle.” Go far enough along the coast and you find the crunchy stuff, but Calais is golden.¿ For a good definition of the word “lonely”, take a Eurostar train to Paris – or, at least, wait for a cross-Channel express train at Calais Freth?tation.Anyone who wants to make a midweek trip on Eurostar from London to the French capital faces a comically high fare: £298 return from Waterloo International. Day-trippers still make up one in three travellers from Folkestone, but they are more likely to be “people going across to France for lunch” rather than to stock up on cigarettes and liquor by the warehouseful.This week, the sun has beamed down benevolently on La Manche, revealing one advantage that the Pas de Calais region has over Kent: sand. I shall not dwell on the place, beyond repeating the final words of the concierge back at the Bristol: “Oh, don’t worry about the broken window.”THE ENDING of duty-free has done Calais a favour, I concluded after talking to Bill Dix, the managing director of Eurotunnel’s shuttle services. But the chambre libre turned out to be in a different hotel entirely, the Tudor, which was across the main road, past a nightclub and down a sidestreet. Hope was fading as fast as the light, when I stumbled across the Hotel Bristol “Chambres libres”, fibbed a sign Yes, they had a single room, and gladly took my euros. “English spoken,” asserts a lower portion of the back wall, which means the no-vacancies sign reads “full” as well as “complet”.The same concise, depressing story was told at the Belazur, the George V and the Folkestone.

That choice was sufficient when the Calais telephone exchange had only a handful of subscribers, but now 03 21 97 54 00 works better. And full.I have a penchant for the Metropol’ Hotel, near Calais Ville station, because of the large phone numbers that have been neatly chiselled on the back wall: “4, 95″. Calais, the port that one guidebook struggles to describe politely, then settles on “unavoidable”, is chic. When my first choice of hotel, the Pacific, declined to take a telephone reservation, I should have realised something was up. Bienvenue ?alais, the Channel port enjoying a tourism boom.This conclusion is reached after a survey that was exhausting rather than exhaustive. The last craft may have hovered off to oblivion, but l’aeroglisseur (as it is officially known here) lives on in a place much closer to London than to the French capital. One final clue, as you approach the station, is a hostelry celebrating a defunct form of transport: the Caf?ub l’Hovercraft.

A walk into town along the Rue de la Mer takes you past a couple of dramatic monuments: one to an aviator who disappeared in the Arctic in 1928; the second to the crew of a submarine that, like Russia’s Kursk, was lost with all hands close to its home port.
A little further, past the Place des Armes and a forlorn 13th-century watchtower, even the least worldly tourist is left in no doubt about what country they are in, thanks to a neon-lit, tricolour-topped 80-foot Eiffel Tower that announces the Caf?e Paris. Fringing the shore is a line of well-appointed hotels and restaurants. The beach stretches lazily towards a hazy horizon, while the sun alights on a huddle of huts marooned in the sand. Tickets cost from £15 per day for the Test match or £20 for the one-day game.. You might like to write one while watching England play Sri Lanka in the Third Test in June or the one-day international the following month. The centre opens daily, and exhibitions are free.Cultural afternoonTo mark the arrival of the Games, the Cornerhouse (16) (0161-200 1500, ) on Oxford Street is running a free exhibition called “Spectator Sport”, in which a number of international artists respond to the idea of televised sport in a variety of mediums.Write a postcardLancashire County Cricket’s Superstore at Old Trafford has a range of postcards featuring players past and present. The centre is in Salford Quays, the venue for the Games’ triathlon The closest Metrolink tram stop is Harbour City.