All is ajar for the arrival of Pope Leo. Paris will be in full alert, streets closed, detour to whatever Waze can tell you with my reliable Audi. Chaotic crowds in the metro and on the road will be the norm. Restaurants will be happy, for sure. And in the end, Pope Leo will be blessed with the fervor of the French (after all, France is the Vatican’s Crowned Princess) and good weather. 

But living in Paris makes up for whatever is your pet peeve of the day.  Which for today is ‘ 46 years of living in France, I still feel homesick.’ HALF OF MY LIFE! 

From Sorbonne to ClubMed, that’s a long time (yes, I’m the first Japayuki, the first mail order bride…but that’s for another story), but I enjoyed, Dahlinks. Only this constant beat of home in Bacolod that doesn’t stop night and day…

It all started when I was three. My maternal grandmother, Doña Josefit Vda. de Lacson, took a fancy for me and asked that I spend some time with her in Silay, the Paris of Negros Island. After a while, I missed Papá and Mamá and I’d cry like a brat until Lola would bring me back home to Bacolod in her black Benz, the back window full of stickers of places around the world that she has visited, mementos of her annual travels.  

So, until I was five, I’d be cajoled, bribed and put to sleep between rides from home in Negros Occidental’s provincial capital, Bacolod City, to Lola’s house in Silay, which was actually a bore because one could only see sugarcane fields and, if lucky, Kanlaon Volcano on a cloudless day. Going back to Silay, Lola would have a paper bag full of cash for her payroll and expenses. 

First cousin Bibing Montelibano Villanueva was my playmate there, and our routine would be to meet up in Lola’s house, then run around the plaza across the street or lay a bouquet in the Cathedral in Silay commissioned by local sugar baron, Don Jose del Rosario Ledesma and built by Italian architect Lucio Bernasconi, a member of the architectural team that built the Eiffel Tower and later, an emigre in Negros who ended up constructing the cathedral and Silay port and marrying Mary Hayden, the mother of Maurice Arcache, our national Palanggâ. 

So my childhood was a trauma of va et viens, always having this nonstop malaise of homesickness. 

That’s why, up to now, I miss my beloved staff in Bacolod who enable me the privilege to think of nothing, and a lifestyle that can’t be bought. The sight of Clinica Garcia turned into Sterling Bank of Asia on one side of the winding driveway, from the gate, and between the front garden that holds my Fountain of Love. They call them perks. 

Still gloating, as I eat my latest fetish, œufs en gelée, on the ultra-successful milestone of Don Papa Rum’s Stephen Carroll in London’s so au courant SKETCH club, with Princess Julia DJing that night, a true London style icon and a muse of that era — the Blitz Kids and Steve Strange’s Visage — alongside the likes of Boy George and Tony Hadley who were all the original Blitz kids back then.

Everyone was beautifully clad and glimmering in the evening’s theme of Modern Romantics. 

So honored to have sat at MY QUEEN, Gina Garcia’s table. To be next to iconic Annie Batungbacal of Manila’s disco era — yes, she’s the song’s inspiration, since the band was composed of her brothers. Apparently, she and Chick Bruton would not miss a night going to CocoBanana. LOL.