Captain you own boat in France where five litres of vino costs under £12

YOU may have heard about the unfortunate chap who got a slap after asking a waitress for a quickie, when he was trying to order a quiche.

His faux pas came to mind while dusting off my O Level French on the Canal du Midi, in the south of that beautiful country.

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We’d booked a seven-day self-drive cruise with hire specialists Le Boat. No press gang was needed to enlist wife Nancy, son John Boy, and best shipmates Denise and Fraser Pentland, as we’ve already cruised in Scotland, Ireland, and France.

Le Boat offered a return sail from their Homps base to Carcassonne, which has flights from Edinburgh.

The airport is 35 minutes by taxi and driver Jean Paul assured us “everything here is cheaper”, a verdict seemingly based on a 1990s visit to Edinboorg.

Petrol and diesel were both 1.90 euros-a-litre (£1.66), and he charged 80 euros (£69.89).

You’ll have no language problems at check-in, though. Le Boat’s delightful Joanna Soligon is English, and — small world — her daughter Evanna is in her fourth year at Glasgow University studying French and Spanish.

Joanna will supply a canal guide — I’d advise rookies to plan their route in advance — and take a fuel deposit (we paid £357 for 23.5 engine hours — 17 euros-per-hour).

Our 48ft Salsa A class had four cabins and sleeps ten using the lounge. Bedrooms are adequate, but storage is tight, as is the phone box-sized ensuite with fun-filled airline-style toilet and manual shower pump.

The toilet roll holder is under the sink, supposedly safe from the shower spray. Ours was on a shelf, and mistakenly stayed there during showering. It’s how wet wipes were invented.

Up top, a big sundeck houses a second steering position, table and moulded seating, and a huge collapsible canopy means you’ll never dine indoors.

A Le Boat technician — in our case the charming Mimi — takes your Salsa guided tour then tests your boat-handling skills, before letting you loose on the canal at 6km-an-hour. I swear we were twice overtaken by butterflies.

We cast off on the Salsa 19, having hired a BBQ and stocked up at the Homps supermarket (£350 for two shops that week).

The 360km canal is rated one of the greatest constructions of the 17th century, linking the Med and the Atlantic through 328 locks, bridges and tunnels. But those impressive facts don’t convey its blissful charm.

Pre-lockdown, we cruised east from Le Somail to Bez­ier, with not a lock in sight. Homps to Carcassonne return has 42 locks. In French, locks are called écluse — as in, Stirling hasn’t got écluse — but our John Boy will assure you they’re not so daunting.

Approaching locks, offload someone (moi) to catch the ropes. Gloves are advisable, since rope burn impairs your ability to hold a glass.

With Fraser steering, Denise and John Boy take ropes fore and aft and throw them up to me on the quay. Or, on occasions, heave them straight into the canal.

The lock-keeper gives a gallic shrug — there’s no calamity he hasn’t witnessed — and the rope is snagged by my pole hook and turned round a bollard.

The pole is a necessity, along with a heavy hammer and two iron spikes to secure moorings on the towpath.

On Scotland’s magnificent Caledonian Canal (200-years-old this year) you moor only at designated jetties. On the Canal du Midi you stop anywhere that takes your fancy.

Lock-keepers start at 9am, lunch promptly at noon and head home at 7pm.

If you’re lucky, a lunch stop will be at Écluse de Puicheric, where lock-keeper Eric Sarrio sells such necessities as wine. His blackboard special prompted a translation double take.

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A 13.5 per cent Corbières rosè at 13 euros (£11.36) — that was clear enough — but did that really say for a FIVE-LITRE box? We bought two!

Eric visited Scotland in the 1980s to watch France in the Five Nations.
After his team played an Edinburgh XV on the Friday, he headed to the bar — and woke up on Sunday. We tried our best to return the compliment.

That’s easy when you’re in France’s largest wine area, with the country’s oldest vines producing Corbières, Languedoc, Minervois, and superb sparklers Blanquette and Cremant de Limoux.

Carcassonne is busy, so phone ahead and book a mooring with the Capitainerie. We paid 42 euros (£36.69) for two nights.

It is a very pleasant 30-minute walk to the Unesco-listed La Cité, a fortified citadel from Roman times, with cobbled lanes housing a cathedral, shops and restaurants which all seemed to close from 2pm to 7pm, so late lunches are out.

In Carcassonne, the mature assistant in a women’s fashion shop thought me and Fraser were wearing Queen T-shirts in honour of the late sovereign. Only the intervention of an English-speaking customer assu­r­­ed her it was a rock band.

At the end of a blissful week we rate east the more interesting route. Le Boat bases Homps and Trebes are very pretty, with nice bars and restaurants, but in other charming hamlets — Marseillette, for example — after a certain hour I doubt you could get a parachute to open.

Dining on deck amid serenity and scenery is one of the joys of canal cruising. Happily for us, Fraser is a superb chef, and produced some local delights to celebrate his 14th anniversary.

But we ate out on the first night and the last, both times at La Peniche (The Barge) in Homps. On their French-only menu, joues de porc looked a safe bet.

On arrival, closer inquiry revealed the three little nuggets of meat were, in fact, pigs’ cheeks. I didn’t have the heart — or the language skills — to ask from which end of the poor beast my meal had been harvested, but it was delicious.

Fraser had giant garlic-infused snails, and the waitress was bemused by our dismay that her name was not Michelle. She rightly credited our hilarity to the wine.

A delightful end to a merveilleux week.

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