I WAS A 7 year old revolutionary when I learned my first few French phrases; ca va?je m’appelle; j’habite; je suis. Instantly hooked by the fantooshness, there commenced a lifelong fascination of the foreign and exotic. In P5 at Crieff Primary School I’d a wee notebook of French vocabulary and I recognised then the excitement and interest of strange tongues, different cultures, varied ways and customs entirely at odds with those of Presbyterian Scots. We left our Crieff caravan for a cottage in the Hillfoots of Clackmannanshire; our destination must have been preordained and written in the stars for the wallpaper in my bedroom there, 100 years old at least, comprised the icons of Paris - there was a yellowing background with the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame and Montmartre. I was in my element until my parents papered the room and I could view Paris again only when I keeked inside the meter box which they had left untouched. But there remained the certainty that one day I would indeed visit that most enchanting of cities.