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Carcasonne is really two towns. The old Cité, east of the Aude, looks like Windsor castle turned into tourist hotels and restaurants. It’s best seen from a distance when its light umber walls and turrets do recall the old land of Languedoc. The new town, basse ville, is a regular right-angled framework of bastide streets with the Canal du Midi as the northern limit. It has several places amongst the streets and we managed to find a restaurant that attracted us. Small, with a single waiter who doubled as Patron, it had at most four tables. The back wall has a massive dresser against which M’sieur leans when not actually serving and the dining room probably used to be his front parlour.
 Monsieur is, not to put too fine a point on it, un numero. Balding, with spectacles on a velvet cord around his neck, he bullies his customers mildly and talks ten to the dozen. My cassoulet, which I have chosen despite the July heat because I’ve not had one before, would satisfy the whole restaurant. I struggle through less than half and M’sieur is aghast: “Monsieur, vous avez appetit comme oiseau!” – but he is smiling – “Ah, les Anglais!” The menu fixe at €11 was quite memorable, and the wine, a Vieux Corbieres, mise en chene, absolutely right.
Saturday we let down our guard and headed for the seaside. Valras Plage with its sand dunes and candy floss is only slightly ahead of Southend. The main street, a rue piétone, is simply one fish restaurant after another. A redeeming feature is the little market with every imaginable species of shell fish: dozens of different clams, excargot de mer, razor clams, scallops, oysters, mussels, lobster, crab and crayfish. Also squid and octopus. I looked for sea urchin (“uni”) whose eggs are such a delicacy in Japan but couldn’t see any: I’m sure they must be there somewhere.
 Lunch was a couple of pizzaladière, the Provencal forerunner of Pizza, and two sétoises, a short local pastry filled with spiced squid washed down with, of course, a Coteaux de Languedoc.
Dinner was a disaster. We drew straws in the matter of a restaurant and settled on what appeared to be one of the quieter ones in the dubious logic that therefore it was less “touristy”. We needen’t have bothered: by eight thirty it was just as crowded as its neighbours. The menu fixe at €8 that at first glance had four courses became three as the frites were listed separately (maybe they specialise in Belgians!) and was delivered – no thrown – onto the table cold and listless. Eh bien, c’est la guerre. Even in France you can’t win ‘em all.
 Agde, at the mouth of the Herault, is also the point at which the Canal du Midi becomes merely a channel through the tidal basin on its way to Sête and the Carmargue. An imposing town of old black basaltic stone, we have our breakfast coffee under a tree on the river bank while a three-legged Alsatian bids us good morning. The first reaction to the animal is reflex – thoughts of pity and `shouldn’t he be put down’ but in truth he seems to have all the capabilities of his quadripedal friends and is holding his own well. No doubt eventually some civil servant in Brussels will insist that a doggy wheel chair and subsidised supplies of `PAL’ be made available.
Agde is an old town, its centre a mass of narrow streets and alleys. There are interesting contrasts: a brightly lit souvenir shop of ceramics, prints and pot pourri adjacent to a straw-littered cave with ancient leather strappings and stalls for two donkeys. In contrast Cap d’Agde, five kilometres away at the end of the peninsula, is very new. An uncompromising effort has been made to duplicate the beautiful people atmosphere of Port Grimaud which doesn’t really come off. The clientele on this southern shore of France are much more the candy-floss and fast-food brigade so while Valras bustles Cap d’Agde struggles.
 The Corbieres, as well as other MIDI AOC’s – Minervois, Coteaux de Languedoc and Fitou - is represented on British wine shelves but normally as simply a bulk-bottling, either with the give-away `Cooperative’ on the label or the supermarket’s own label (which may mean they sent Dudley Moore out to buy it – you have been warned!) These anonymous wines are certainly sold in France, often in Carrefour or LeClerc, at prices around €2.5-3.0 a bottle. Go over €5 and you can find vintaged wines from individual estates – mise en bouteille a la domaine – that you will want to write down and remember. Perhaps the most important change in the past ten years from the Midi has been the emergence of `Vin de pays d’Oc’ wines as a complete revelation. Why this should be so centers on the wording of the traditional AOC’s in this part of France.
 For centuries, the grape types grown here have been those considered suitable for the dry, Spanish style, climate, namely the Spanish grapes Carignan, Grenache, Mordevre and Cencibel. These grapes produced a hell of a lot of wine per hectare of the gros rouge variety and went to satisfying the dejeuners of most of middle class France. But then the Common Market arrived and virtually the same wines from Spain, Portugal and Italy were available at lower cost without hefty customs duties. The Midi was suffering. A few brave souls began to question the old wisdom that the great grapes of Bordeaux and Burgandy could only be grown there: after all, they had been exported to California, Mexico, Argentina and Chile, the Hunter and Barossa Valleys and done well, so let’s try some down here.
Ah, but, M’sieur, according to the Appelation d’Origin Controlée in this part of France you can’t grow Cabernet Sauvignan (or Merlot or Pinot Noir) and call it Corbieres, Minervois etc. OK, let’s use the old and wider umbrella of Vin de Pays d’Oc which grew out of the even more mediocre VDQS label which is translated in English as `plonk’. So they did this: and they blended Cabernet with Merlot, as done in Pauillac: and they aged it in oak anywhere from one to two years: and they began to win prizes in Paris and Macon: and the Bordelais started to sit up and take notice.
Today wine stores here have separate sections for the Vin de Pays d’Oc and they are very, very good.
Lezignan is the centre of the Corbieres country and in the nearby village of Cruscades is a `Bed & Breakfast` run by a couple of Brits, Tony and Marion. We called in unannounced but they must have been at the market. Their establishment – La Citadelle – is in fact two or three old village houses run into one and through open windows we could see neat flounces of pink-patterned curtains and furnishings a la Laura Ashley. Lots of geraniums in pots and inquisitive ginger toms lurking around corners. The BMW doesn’t go easily through these narrow pavé streets in these Midi villages so Shanks Pony is the only way.
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Then to Beziers. Where Carcasonne, and particularly the Basse Ville, seemed sleepy, Beziers is alive in the sun. The centre of the town is on a peak overlooking the Orb river and the Canal du Midi which itself crosses the river in a 19th C. aqueduct. Here, Pierre-Paul Ricquet, the builder of the Canal, was born in the early 17th C. and the central broad street is the Allées Paul Ricquet. A market devoted to flowers and plants is in full swing in the central pedestrian area, reminiscent of Las Ramblas in Barcelona. At the bottom steps fall away through the gardens and bird sanctuary and leads us to the station and Beziers’s lock basin on the Canal.
The dream of inter-connecting the deux mers of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean has taunted men for 2,000 years. The Romans considered it, Charlemagne planned it, but it wasn’t until the end of the 17th century that a civil servant under Louis XIV conceived and built the 250 km waterway linking the city of Toulouse with the Etang de Thau beyond Agde. Uniquely, the Canal du Midi does not follow any major river and Ricquet was forced to build long feeder canals from the Black Mountain to guarantee enough water. But this absence also means that the middle portion of the Canal, 51 km of it, has no locks at all.
 Éditions Loubatieres of Toulouse produce an illustrated booklet on the Canal and its creator which is a `must’ for students of the phenomenon “faux amis” – similar appearing words in English and French that actually have quite different, occasionally opposite, meaning. Not quite `coup de grace - a French lawnmower’ but you get the drift. Bernard Blancotte’s - Canal du Midi’ is written in a marvellous Perils-of-Pauline-suspense style that illustrates clearly why French speakers have so much trouble with English verbs and we with theirs.
(“Faux amis” works in reverse – we kept seeing temporary signs on French roads announcing `CHANTIERS’ and expecting to be entertained by bands of roving singers courtesy of the French Tourist Board. But they turned out to be merely navvies.)
At the lock basin in Beziers is an immaculate Dutch barge whose Texan owners have brought it down from Paris through the canals of Burgundy and the Rhone. Mr Texas warns us….
“Yer need ter watch these hiah people on merney – we bin overcharged wernce too often!”
…. And goes back to varnishing his lee-board. But Mrs T is much more simpatico and, probably, the French speaker of the pair.
The Canal du Midi has an extraordinary effect on the large towns through which it flows – Toulouse, Castelnaudary, Carcasonne, Beziers and Narbonne (a branch canal) - rather like an airconditioning duct through an over-heated room. A cool stillness spreads from the slow water and the stately trees – limes, cypress and poplars – that guard the banks in military precision. And as you drive haphazardly around the minor roads of this land you suddenly recognise that majestic procession of uniform greenery on the horizon and know that you will soon be crossing or recrossing the Canal.
 Returning to Toulouse on the N113 the road on a Sunday is almost deserted and the midday heat is stifling, reminiscent of Hong Kong in the hours before a typhoon hits. Probably we should have dropped off the main road into Castelnaudary with its ancient brown streets and imposing cathedral but we can’t summon up the energy to park. At Villefranche – its name “French Town” a reminder of the regions medieval links with Spain and Aragon – thirst finally forces a halt. You could be in deepest Arizona but for the age of the buildings. The ramrod-straight main street is deserted at 3pm: a gas station, a half-acre space offering `voitures d’occasion’ and a bar with its brown wood counter and deep, deep recesses of cool. Three mascara’d dowagers, looking for all the world like a trio of Portsmouth landladies, run the place and whilst two of them set us up with a `pression’ and an `eau gazeuse’ the third holds station at the front door in a white plastic chair. Is she waiting for the Sheriff with whom she once long ago enjoyed a brief romance?
This `pit stop’ involves discharging as well as taking on liquid. We agree that the only polite way to describe the lavatory arrangements at some bars and cafes in southern France is, like Mozart’s Rondo, “A La Turque” which gives you the general idea.
Finally Toulouse and another world. The only way to describe Toulouse is `Los Angeles with a French centre’. The western suburbs are dominated by the Air France main base at Blagnac, by Aerospatiale, Airbus Industrie and the many suppliers that serve them. The east of the city has France’ space research effort – assembling the Ariane rockets and satellites. All of this intersected by a maze of freeways that wouldn’t look out of place in southern California. But even here the recession bites: I make a routine business call on Aerospatiale that coincides with a peaceful `manifestation’ by redundant engineers. The BMW and its two occupants are trapped for an hour in the main parking lot which is about the size of Scarborough.
It is in the street names of the centre of Toulouse that one can find the key to its present day hi-tech bustle. From here in the 20’s the aviation pioneers – Mermos, Saint Exubery and the rest – began the mail and passenger routes to France’s African colonies and on to South America.
The beginning of a journey for them – an end for us.
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