Too bad it wasn’t December. Or January. Or February. Especially February, when the city has been dark and rainy for months with no end in sight and the idea of sun lures a man to the airport without complaint.

It is hard to leave Paris like this, in early June. The birds singing and the lovers strolling and lighting each other’s cigarettes. The terraces of every bistro crowded and the grinning tourists glowing in the oh-so-slow sunsets.

To pack up and hail a cab and take the melancholy ride to CDG … It was harder than usual. Some of it was about days of not having to be anywhere but able to go everywhere. Some of it was friends and acquaintances and fine meals and wonderful baguettes.

A lot of it was Paris in spring. Ahh.

(That is me in the Luxembourg Gardens, above. The Luxembourg Palace is in the background.)

Then came the Typical Intercontinental Flight. Not many events in life seem so intense and personal as a long plane ride — and so completely boring to anyone outside your own skin. Really, do any of us want to hear the predictable details of someone else’s long plane ride?

One day after we get off the plane, we hardly remember them ourselves.

We flew back on Qatar Airways, a well-run and competitively priced company with lots of new planes that seems on the verge of dominating the Gulf market (with Gulf Air struggling, and Emirates and, especially, Etihad too expensive for real people). Their planes tend to be packed, and when you arrive in Doha you notice that about 90 percent of the people on any flight are transferring, which means Qatar is going to carry them even further …

We will not bore you with details. Just a couple of flying observations.

1. If I have to go to CDG, I’d prefer to leave out of Terminal 1. It has a reputation for being old and difficult, but the “board on a jetway” thing is so huge for me, that the lines at passport control are worth it.

2. I’m thinking these new, in-flight multimedia TV options are bad for a person’s intellectual development. It wasn’t long ago that we all watched the same movie … and then came a few years where we had the choice of five or six movies … and now it’s 30 movies, 200 TV shows, video games, sports clips …

I once took advantage of six, 10, 12 hours in the air to fill in a few blanks in my movie-viewing history. But now? I didn’t even look at the voluminous Qatar Airways offerings. Instead, I went directly to “TV” and “comedies” and watched five episodes of New Girl and one of Cheers. On the way to Paris I had seen no fewer than six episodes of 30 Rock.

I’m not sure this makes me a better, more well-rounded person; I had seen every one of those sitcom episodes previously.

Only last year I saw Midnight in Paris and War Horse while cruising at 35,000 feet, and not only was I entertained, it seemed a vaguely edifying experience — and also helped me have rooting interests in the Oscars show.

Back in Abu Dhabi at 11 p.m.  The wind storms had stopped, and it was powerfully humid with night temperatures around 95. The air was thick enough to carve, and the sweater I had worn out of Paris seemed like a suicide vest, in the simmering UAE heat.

“We’ll always have Paris” was meant to be of comfort, from Bogie to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. But Paris in the past tense seemed almost painful, this time around.