Every holiday ought to have one - an utterly unexpected surprise that appears out of nowhere. On our cruise down the Canal du Midi in South-Western France that surprise turned out to be a tiny waterside hamlet called Le Somail. It's an insignificant blob on the waterways map, but in real life it's a place plucked straight out of a travel brochure: an ancient stone bridge vaulting the canal, barges and houseboats tethered up to flower-filled wine barrels, an old church, stone-clad homes with red tile roofs and walls crawling with vines and creepers, a courteous canopy of pine, oak and sycamore trees, a resident barge that doubles as a grocery and fashion boutique, an ivy-clotted inn at the water's edge, a provincial restaurant with tables and chairs strewn under the foliage, a weekly flea market staged on the banks of the canal, one of the largest antiquarian bookstores in all France and - to top it off - the country's only museum devoted excusively to the history of the hat. You just have to love it. Le Somaile isn't so much a place - it's an experience, a Gallic Brigadoon, a frayed-at-the-edges sepia postcard depicting the ideal, lost-in-time Provencal village of popular imagination. The village isn't in Provence per se (it's on the fringes) and is actually in the region known as the Aude. Then again, it might be in the region known as the Minervois: the French are notoriously vague about such matters. Like Brigadoon, perhaps it shifts back and forth through time, space and place whenever it feels like it. The village also has its stock of New Age invaders - expatriate Englishmen who have forsaken the grey clouds and rain squalls of the British Isles for the sunny serenity of French rural life. These immigrants are everywhere: florid, well-fattened fellows with their poodles and wearing their time-honoured immigrant trademark - a yellow straw sun hat (the Poms, that is, not the poodles).

said DaveMullany 11 months 9 days ago