Diary – 23 September 2006

Talk about from the ridiculously sublime to the sublimely ridiculous. My fiancée and I have just been staying at the incomparable 13th-century Château de Bagnols near Lyons. Spectacular panoramic views of the Beaujolais countryside; a Michelin-starred restaurant; Olga Polizzi’s taste (our room had a Louis XIII bed); pure perfection in hospitality. Then straight on to Center Parcs in Wiltshire with my children. Of course, I was warned how nargy it was going to be, and several people assumed I was only going there to write a spectacularly snobbish article. I was also pretty suspicious about a place that couldn’t spell its own name properly, in either the adjective or the noun. In the end it was perfectly bearable, I suppose, and my insufficiently class-conscious children adored every moment, needless to say. The weird thing was that it somehow wound up costing as much as Bagnols.

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I had ample opportunity to make a study of tattoos while at Center Parcs, and have concluded that whereas the older Briton sports traditional representations of anchors, regimental mottos — for some reason the Royal Artillery’s ‘Ubique’ was, well, ubique — and loved ones’ names, the younger generation tend to have unintelligible New Agey-style scribbles that often look like the logos for triads.