Light came dappled through the overhanging trees

These displays of medieval pageantry are taken extremely seriously by skilled riders; areas slightly further afield, such as the Camargue and Pau, are famed for their equestrian excellence. My most recent visit to Carcassonne is in spring and everything is stirring: the fresh leaves on the trees; the tender, curling grapevines; the residents springcleaning their shops and restaurants in preparation for the summer invasion. No one yet has frayed tempers and the bus driver who takes me and other passengers from Carcassonne's Salvaza Airport to the old monastery where I'm staying chats goodnaturedly the whole way, making sure I know exactly where I'm headed when I get off. Later that day, trying to catch another bus to a nearby wildlife park, Le Parc Australien (see story opposite), and discovering that I have inadvertently discarded my allday travel ticket, the same airport bus driver happens to pull up in his bus. He vouches for me; the new driver lets me on without a ticket and I am on my way. That's the kind of place Carcassonne is: small, friendly, with bus and taxi drivers who like to stop and chat. The taxi driver who drives me back from Le Parc Australien has moved here from Paris because it is a happier place to live. He admits there are poor employment prospects for the town's young people and problems with strikes in the French education system but Carcassonne has good food, good people and good weather. That evening, the sun still hot at seven o'clock, I sit beneath the plane trees and have a pastis in Place Carnot, the square of Carcassonne. The lively centre of the Bastide SaintLouis (the "new" part from the 19th century), Place Carnot has dozens of cafes and bars and wonderful thriceweekly food markets. Traffic is restricted in the square (although Carcassonne's youth enjoy nothing better than whizzing around the surrounding streets on those flybuzzing scooters famous throughout France, Italy and Greece for annoying the elderly). Families are out with their children; young lovers canoodle and longmarried couples drink aperitifs in Rosetta Stone Software companionable silence. The Bar Felix might be supposed to be a tourist trap but I find it full of locals, les vrais francais. Just weeks before, when spring was still trembling on the lip of winter, I had stayed with my family in a beautifully renovated baker's shop that is now a gite, in a tiny village named Plaigne, not far from Carcassonne. This part of Languedoc looks not unlike Tuscany, with burnt sienna colours, vineyards and darkgreen pines. The first asparagus of the season were out, fat, creamylooking, and every day we ate some with meals, with ripe cheese and fruity wines almost as cheap as bottled water. We hired a boat and puttered down the Canal du Midi, the famed canal built in the 17th century to link the Mediterranean with the Atlantic. Light came dappled through the overhanging trees, the sun not yet strong enough to wish to hide from it. On other days, we climbed to the hearts of ruined Cathar castles or went to fetes, once arriving in time to watch a parade of local tractors, some from the early years of last century. No one but a few scattered Britons who have retired here spoke English. One local Englishwoman helped me out, in flawless French, when I was talking to the butcher in Belpech, who was explaining some complicated arrangements for tickets to the fete. It was right out of a Balzac short story, perhaps one about a local butcher who knows everything, who is the point at which a gossipy village meets a butcher who is passionate about meat, cradling each carefully cut portion as gently as he might a newborn child. But now I am in Carcassonne sans famille and, after deciding against a second pastis, I wander back from the Place Carnot, across the beautiful stonearched Pont Vieux bridge and down through the cobbled medieval streets of the Quartier Barbacane, where I'm staying.

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