Spectator Life

I’m in a car embarking on a road trip through one of the great foodie regions of the world, charged with the onerous task of scoffing and boozing my way through five days of epicurean heaven. But where am I? Trundling along the Rhone valley from Lyon to Provence? Barrelling down the autostrada to Bologna?

England is a mystical place, and its epicentre is Glastonbury, known by its pagan residents as Avalon, the mythical island of the Arthurian legend. It has sacred springs, the supposed tomb of King Arthur, the Tor and ruined tower, proximity to Stonehenge and now a thriving, sprawling community of pagans, with dozens of denominations from druid to water-witch.

Twenty years ago, the Spanish railway company RENFE stole my girlfriend’s father. There were four of us – my girlfriend, her dad, and a university friend of ours. We had been in Spain for more than a month, walking the Camino de Santiago. Now it was time to head home, first by train to Bilbao

Having a child growing up in Italy means regular flights there and back from Stansted airport. This is unfortunate, as I find nearly any other form of transport preferable. It isn’t so much the flying itself – I lack the imagination to envisage what it really means to hover 38,000 feet above the earth in

Sir Ranulph Fiennes (a third cousin of Ralph, since you ask) has written a book about Lawrence of Arabia. He feels an affinity with him: he too has led Arabs in fighting, in Sir Ranulph’s case, for the Sultan of Oman. ‘I’d been in Arabia, leading Arabs against the Marxist rebels. In Lawrence’s day, the

I am on a retreat in the Portuguese mountains outside Faro, a heavenly place called Moinhos Velhos. I have not eaten food in three days. I have practised hours of yoga and meditation. I have swum many cool, slow lengths of a blue-tiled pool and sweated in a wood-fired sauna and walked for miles through

In the early 1950s, as a very small school boy, I would travel between Inverness and London by steam sleeper train. The adventure started with tea in the Inverness Station Hotel while awaiting the train south. My parents never worried about my safety – unlike today, when children must have constant supervision from only the

On Saturday, I went to the synagogue in Béziers. I was motivated by defiance, sentiment, and an urge to demonstrate solidarity, but hardly from any rekindled religiosity. I’ve never had any to be rekindled. Like my namesake, the late Dr Jonathan Miller, said in Beyond the Fringe, ‘I’m not really a Jew… but I’m Jew-ish;

When was the last time you woke up bright and early on a weekday morning, with no need for an alarm call, rested and impatient for the day ahead? My last time was a week ago, when I awoke in the Pier Hotel in Harwich, eager to walk the first bit of my latest hike, along the Suffolk Coast Path. The Saxons sailed up this river to conquer East Anglia after the fall

Japan is known for its food. People from across the world visit the Land of the Rising Sun to eat everything from the delectable seafood of Tsukiji Market in Tokyo to the local varieties of ramen that can be found across the nation’s 47 prefectures. And yet you would be mistaken if you believed that

Wild camping is ‘a modish phrase meaning camping overnight in a place which is not a dedicated campsite’, according to Lord Justice Underhill in a Court of Appeal judgment in July – and isn’t it wonderful that there are still judges carrying on the fine judicial tradition of handling the colloquial as if were radioactive

I don’t know about you, but my reaction to learning about the felling of that tree in Northumberland was, well, weird. For a start, unlike many others, I’ve never hugged this lovely tree, never picnicked beneath it, never proposed next to it, never seen it after a long satisfying hike along Hadrian’s Wall, so I

I was writing a thriller in northeast Laos about 15 years ago near a town called Phonsavan, researching a mysterious megalithic site known as the Plain of Jars. When my research was done, I realised I had to devise a route home to the quaint Laotian capital of Vientiane. As I was driving one of

It was September 2001 and I was in Zagreb, Croatia, at the end of two weeks in the Balkans. I was there to train law enforcers in counter-trafficking initiatives: the importation of women from that region into Western European sex markets was rife following the war in the 1990s. Police in the UK had disrupted

‘Vous êtes anglais, je suppose?’ A question frequently posed to me in France. To which I reply: ‘C’est compliqué.’ To be honest, I’m not sure. If one passport is good, two are better. I have three. Crise d’identité. In France, I am Irish, thanks to my grandmother, born in County Antrim. In Canada, I am

The English teacher abroad is a generally peripatetic animal. He moves somewhere for a year or two and then gets bored, runs out of money or fathers an illegitimate child before moving along. Meet him and he has a thousand stories about Mexican border guards, Thai prostitutes and Russian oligarchs. Enjoy the conversation. He won’t

Rome is Europe’s most beautiful city, but there’s a downside: the most famous attractions are nearly always overwhelmed with crowds. The line for the Colosseum bakes under the unbearable Roman sun; the Sistine Chapel queue snakes through the Vatican; the Trevi fountain is spoiled by selfie seekers. Fortunately, though, there is a way of avoiding

In the summer of 1986, two men, Larry Harvey and Jerry James, built an eight-foot-tall wooden effigy of a man and set fire to it on a beach in San Francisco. The event – an impromptu bonfire attended by several dozen of their closest friends – spawned what has since become a cultural phenomenon: an

It all proved too much for Mrs Ray. We were in St Kitts and Nevis for a week-long Caribbean break and on the flight over I’d wondered aloud how early each day it would be acceptable to start on the rum. I soon got my answer.  Having misguidedly checked in to the St Kitts Marriott

Wistman’s Wood is one of the UK’s last remaining temperate rainforests. It came within Prince William’s purview after he inherited the Duchy of Cornwall, the largest privately owned portion of Dartmoor National Park. He has since visited the site, a seven-acre strip of oak woodland on the eastern slopes of the West Dart Valley, posing

As I gazed upon the first circle of hell, otherwise known as Stansted Airport, I felt as though I was witnessing a microcosm of everything that has gone wrong with our hapless nation. Thousands of desperate flyers were left stranded across the UK earlier this week after what appeared to be another air traffic control

The roads around Monmouth are quiet but have their attractions; they cut through valleys and woods, past castles and churches. My host, soignee interior designer Neil McLachlan, explains that this part of the world is a well-kept secret, popular with minor gentry and Londoners in the know but protected from the crowds that flush in and

To Paxos, Homer’s inspiration they say, for Circe’s Isle. These days, there’s still enchantment, albeit of a less carnal kind. Skies are azure, waters pellucid and the days fall quickly into the most indolent of rhythms. Breakfast, swim, book. Drink, lunch, sleep. Swim, book, drink. Dinner, then bed. Sometimes, though, it seems that great swathes

I’m hiking along a footpath through glorious English countryside, across lush green meadows framed by ancient woodland. I’ve hardly seen a soul today, just a few solitary dogwalkers. I’ve been walking all day and my legs are aching, but I can’t recall the last time I felt so contented, so alive. Welcome to the Essex

‘We’re all mad here,’ I mumble as I head towards the Cheshire Cat. To my left is the home of the world’s most famous mouse – and a sign warning guests to expect a wait of up to an hour and a half if they want to meet him. This is my tenth trip down

It’s the time of year to revisit one of life’s great imponderables. British seaside holidays. Why do we do them? Which other experience – save perhaps attending a British boarding school in the past – does as much to remind you of the essential unfairness of life? Forget the costs involved (if Marianna Mazzucato wants

Totnes is like any other small town in England insofar as there are limited shops and people will try to sell you mouldy produce at an ‘organic’ price. Other than that, it’s a different world. This is the same place that started its own currency – albeit unsuccessfully. The same place that fought back against Costa