Sometimes the most innocuous comments, in the most curious of environs, delivered by the most incongruous of people, triggers envious longings and bouts of home-sickness or frustration born of circumstance.

And so it was one balmy evening this week when I found myself in downtown Kandahar talking to a bearded Scotsman, who had been working in private security here for the last eighteen months. I was picking his brains for some local ‘knowledge’ and a précis of insurgent activity. He was regaling me, in front of a map, with the various bombings, kidnaps, murders, fire-fights et cetera, when he used the phrase ‘and there was claret everywhere’, and suddenly I lost clarity and drifted in to a Bordeaux-craving reverie.

Maybe for five minutes afterwards my thoughts turned to the produce of those clever little men of the Gironde and my excellent and kindly vintner, Simon Wrightson who gifted me a delicious Chateaux Beaulieu for a last drink before I departed a month ago.

What I wanted at that moment, more than any other earthly pleasure, was to be sat in an English garden, with the Darling-Betrothed enjoying a bottle, or two, without a care in the world. Sadly the apparition quickly passed and it was back to the task in hand. Writing this has in no way slaked that thirst.