The spectre of the Charlie Hebdo killings still hangs over Paris. Outside the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, opposite the Louvre, there’s a big poster of Cabu, one of the murdered cartoonists. The poster is peppered with fake bullet holes; underneath, the caption reads, ‘It doesn’t hurt at all.’ I didn’t realise, until I talked
My first visit to Athens as a student gave me a set of impressions that the present crisis has only validated. The man designated to meet us at the airport did not turn up. I will never forget his name. It was Nic Katsoudis. So we got in a taxi anyway. It crashed twice on
Legend has it that Mark Antony considered Turkey’s Turquoise Coast so beautiful that, in about 32 bc, he gave it to Cleopatra as a wedding present. The country’s southernmost shore stretches for nearly a thousand miles and combined incredible scenery, clear azure waters and a warm Mediterranean climate. Its strategic location means it has been
Syracuse is a handsome place, steeped in a rich historical broth. At the tip sits Ortygia, an island offshoot, which has been the backdrop to many Mediterranean sagas: Hellenic, Christian, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque — take your pick. By day, Via de Benedictis is filled with local men selling sea urchins, milky balls of ricotta and
Fez is one of the seven medieval wonders of the world. An intact Islamic city defined by its circuit of battlemented walls, it is riven by alleyways. You pass doorways that look into a 10th-century mosque, then a workshop courtyard, before coming through a teeming covered market and twisting past the high walls of a
I arrived in Venice believing it would reek of sewage. It didn’t. The walk into the centre went through cobbled alleys packed with loud Americans in sandals and Italian ladies tottering in kitten heels. But it was when crossing the Rialto bridge that I first felt as though I was truly in Venice, with tacky
I was working on the final edit of my book — a fictionalised account of the year Charles Rennie Mackintosh spent in Suffolk — when news came in that his most famous architectural creation, The Glasgow School of Art, was on fire. My heart lurched. This was an unimaginable tragedy, not just for Glasgow, but
The Go Galway bus from Dublin sounds an unlikely pleasure, but it is both comfortable and punctual. There is free Wi-Fi if you want it, but it would be criminal to do anything other than gawp at the view. Two and a half hours pass quickly when you are travelling at sunset, passing between rain
This time three years ago, I hadn’t jumped a single thing for almost ten years. This season, I am happily jumping hedges that my horse and I can’t even see over the top of. Crazy? Most likely. But when the adrenaline is pumping, and an inviting-looking hedge is looming directly in front of you —
Every day the Isle of Wight becomes England’s smallest county: when-ever the tide comes in, the island steals the crown from Rutland, if only for a few hours. Taking the Wightlink ferry reminds you that the isle gave us the hovercraft, Christopher Cockerell’s early experiments there involving a hairdryer and some empty cat-food tins. Less
As a boy camping with my father on safaris deep in the African bush, there were no tents involved; we just slept by the fire like cowboys in the open under the constellations. Supper was sweet tea and biltong and we used a tin bucket for a shower. When it rained we simply moved underneath
Getting here took a long time. First a flight to Seattle, then a connection to Fairbanks, followed by a coach to Coldfoot Camp and a final stage by minibus. It’s long after midnight and I’m shivering outside a snow-covered lodge in Wiseman, Alaska (population: 14), two hours north of the Arctic Circle, wrenching my tripod
The fabulous October weather is now just a memory but it made for a golden, old-fashioned apple day down in Somerset. The plan was to pick and convert a mound of sugar-rich Redstreaks — about 400 kilos — into a rather special vintage. We would pour the apple juice into an oak hogshead, freshly emptied of its
We’ve all been there, I’m sure. You work your pan off to get everything done in time. You count down the days until you can break out of the madhouse of pre-Christmas London. Then you’re brought down by the dreaded lurgy. I was all for cancelling our travel plans and spending Christmas under the duvet.
The first time I checked in to a French hotel with a golden retriever — his name was Gregory, predecessor of the incumbent Douglas — I left him, clearly unhappy, in the bedroom when I went to dinner. Then I realised that every other party already in the dining room included a dog, in some
Fate occasionally leads travellers to places they had never planned to visit. Into this category, for me, fell Malta. I went to Valletta to see my sister, who was at a nursing conference. I wasn’t expecting a wild party; the island has a reputation for being fairly dry compared with its Mediterranean sisters. Yet for
For a melancholy example of the power of celebrity, head to the Alps. Since Michael Schumacher’s accident last December in Méribel, the use of ski helmets has soared in the mountains. My skiing instructor in Verbier, in the Swiss Alps, said the Schumacher effect was particularly acute among the young and the old — it’s
The British overseas territory of Gibraltar, or, as some would have it, the wart on the bottom of the Iberian peninsula, is not an exciting place for a holiday. You don’t go for the food (mostly English pub grub and pizzas), or the nightlife (there isn’t any) or the beaches (overcrowded, with sand imported from
My husband and I stay for a week most summers in Portmeirion, the strangest and loveliest ‘village’ in the world. Built amid 20 miles of woodland on the peninsula of Tremadog Bay in Wales, it was called ‘a home for fallen buildings’ by its creator Clough Williams-Ellis, a local landowner. It was opened in 1926,
Driving up the west coast, from Bridge-town to Speightstown, you soon see why people around here call this the Platinum Coast. It’s not just the colour of the coral sand — it’s the colour of the foreign money. These seafront lots sell for millions, prices few Bajans can afford. Yet once you head inland you
