Postscript

We have not been back to Narbonne or Frasquenet for over a decade now. We have relocated to Asia and these days I spend much of my time travelling, either on business or on site seeing holidays.

Since being here I have seen the Taj Mahal at Agra and picked Ceylon tea at a plantation near Kandy in Sri Lanka. I have visited temples in Thailand and photographed paddy fields in Indonesia. In Burma, I’ve taken a boat trip down the Irrawaddy river, from Mandalay to temple strewn Pagan, en route to Rangoon. I have watched Japanese musicians dressed up as the Beatles, sing their songs at the Cavern Club in Tokyo and have sung karaoke with Korean clients in Seoul.

It is difficult to justify going back to the Languedoc for now, when the likes of Ankor Wat, Borobodur and Lake Toba are so nearby and are still on my list of places to visit.

Just as you can now purchase just about any Asian spice or other food stuff from shops in many Western cities and towns, so too here in the East, I can buy wines from the Languedoc, Roquefort cheese and freshly baked baguettes.

Of course a glass of Madiran still tastes much better in Toulouse than it does in Manila, and that elusive taste of coffee drunk in France still evades me. Only last night I shared a bottle of red ‘Le Clot’ from ‘La Clape’ with a friend. Never having sampled ‘Le Clot’ when I was in ‘La Clape’, I had no preconceived notion as to how it should taste, thus I was not disappointed.

Several times a year I still rustle up a substantial cassoulet, although I have yet to find a local source of Toulouse sausage. Just yesterday I made up a bottle of Pizza oil, containing multi coloured pepper corns, dried red chilis and a large sprig of rosemary. I did this more for kitchen decoration than anything else, since I seldom eat pizza at home these days.

Much of my leisure time is spent connected to the internet. There is now a WebCam which looks over the main square in Narbonne. Right now as I sit here looking at my monitor, drinking coffee and eating a croissant from a nearby French delicatessen, I am looking down on others doing the same, on the pavement outside ‘Le Petit Mokka’. For me it is three o’clock in the afternoon, for them it is eight in the morning.

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