Paris attacks tear at heartstrings in many ways

Many Chinese travel agencies have cancelled tour plans in France due to security fears after the last week Paris attacks. [File photo]

I lived in Paris for five happy years in the 1980s - I met my wife there, my eldest daughter was born there, and I made many French friends with whom I still remain in contact.

Like many a foreign resident of Paris, I grew in turn to be charmed and irked by the everyday life in Paris, so different from my native London.

Pluses were - and still are - the attractions of a city undamaged by wartime bombing, its stunning architecture a heady backdrop to the everyday life of café society, the inviolable routine of lunch, and the correct emphasis placed by the French on what they call la qualite de vie, or the quality of life.

Minuses were the appalling traffic in the French capital's narrow streets, the almost routine rudeness of French waiters, and the snarl-ups on the Parisian ring road, the infamous peripherique, on Friday nights and Monday mornings. But it was all part of French living.

Now that pattern has been brutally smashed, not by an isolated act of terror, but by a calculated, coordinated assault by seven - or is it eight - people against people that their parent organization, the Islamic State, described as "idolaters".

They were ordinary people doing what any civilized society does on a Friday night - going out for a meal, watching a soccer match, attending a concert, or just having a drink or a coffee with friends in one of the city's myriad cafés.