Travel

Last week Caroline sent me an Instagram reel that featured a Norwegian word and its English translation. A ‘tidsoptimist’, I discovered, is ‘someone who is overly optimistic about how much time they have, often underestimating how long tasks will take and therefore frequently running late’. That perfectly describes me. Caroline is punctual to a fault, often arriving early to appointments, and she finds my tardiness intensely irritating. Whenever I have to meet her anywhere – at a friend’s house for dinner, for instance – she will pretend I’m expected 15 minutes beforehand, so when I’m quarter of an hour late I will actually be on time. At one point, she

Business travel isn’t quite the perk it is cracked up to be. For one thing, you have no say about where you go or when (New Yorkers are rude about London weather, but their own city is uninhabitable for four months of the year). Even when the weather is perfect, you often have no opportunity to extend your stay, so most of your time is spent in airports and meetings. The taxi from the airport may be the cultural highlight of the whole trip. Nothing has a worse effort-to-reward ratio than staying in a hotel for a single night. And, worst of all, while you are awake at 3 a.m. watching

Seldom has a collective term been less appropriate: ‘the Channel Islands’ – as though these were in any sense (other than the geographical) a place. Entertained in my English mind had been a scatter of similar, pretty but perhaps over-manicured little islands stuck in the mid-Channel between Great Britain and France but sunnier, and where tax-avoiders are the indigenous population. Wrong, wrong, wrong. For family reasons I’ve just spent some time on Jersey, Guernsey and Alderney, sadly missing Sark and Herm. My island-hopping trip, though short, showed me how wide of the mark these assumptions are. Guernsey is by no means manicured and is in places pleasingly unkempt, while Alderney

Oscar, 26, joins me on Google Meet from Buenos Aires, having arrived earlier that day from New York – by way of a few hours in Mexico City and Panama. Just five days ago, he was in London. ‘New York was just going to be a weekend trip for a conference, but then I thought while I’m in America, I might as well head south and here I am.’ It’s a far cry from Wales, where his family lives. Yet this itinerary is barely a ripple in Oscar’s relentless travel schedule. His nonstop approach to flying places him firmly within a new tribe of Gen-Z frequent fliers – mostly men

I’ve just returned from Colombia, where I’ve been visiting my daughter. She’s doing a modern languages degree and has to spend her third year in a Spanish-speaking country either working or studying. Instead of opting for a university in Barcelona or Madrid, which would be the normal thing to do, she decided to get a job in Medellin. Can’t think where she gets that rebellious streak! So that’s why I’ve spent the past week in South America. Colombia is quite a long way to go for such a short trip. To get to Medellin, I flew via Madrid, which meant departing from Gatwick at 10 a.m. and arriving at about

How do you live with yourself when 179 air passengers are burned alive on a South Korean runway, and you’ve spent the last few weeks binge-watching YouTube videos about plane crashes? The obvious answer is that I need to seek help. I have a defence, but I don’t think any British jury would buy it. I started watching the air-crash videos to escape the anxiety caused by the American presidential election. Anxiety that Donald Trump might lose, that is. On YouTube there’s always someone listening. It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet for monomaniacs I can imagine Emily Maitlis and Rory Stewart’s reaction: ‘Self-declared Trump supporter chills out by imagining planes full of

I read with some disappointment recently that the Encyclopaedia Britannica considers 61 – the age I am now – to be the beginning of old age. It defines ‘middle age’ as being between the ages of 40 and 60, which means that’s in my rear-view mirror. The only crumb of comfort is that some more charitable encyclopaedias describe the years 60 to 69 as ‘young old’, which is better than being an old Young I suppose. When I turned 60 last year, I told myself that you’re only as old as you feel and took succour from the fact that I’ve never spent a night in hospital, apart from when

Albanians are descended from the most ancient of European peoples, the Illyrians. The country came into existence only after 1912 with the demise of Ottoman power in Europe. Its first ruler, the glorified Muslim chieftain King Zog, was hounded out by Mussolini when fascist Italy invaded in 1939. (Zog was put up in London for a while at the Ritz.) Five years later the Nazi Germans were expelled by the Albanian resistance fighter Enver Hoxha. Outwardly a Stalinist, the artful Hoxha was a Muslim-born Ottoman dandy figure who terrorised his Balkan fiefdom through retaliatory murders, purges and the trap-door disappearance of class enemies. Albania has long lived in Italy’s shadow.

Last week, on a Swedish train somewhere between Linkoping and Mjolby, as I struggled to open a bag of cheesy doofers that was to serve as my lunch, my travel companions began unwrapping their own picnics. Some, like me, had made hasty and unappetising purchases at the station. Others had carefully curated lunches, assembled earlier in the day from our hotel’s lavish breakfast buffet. Well-filled rolls, pieces of fruit, pastries. In they tucked. Germans may be on the march at dawn, annexing sun loungers, but it’s the Brits who secrete breakfast goods I was suddenly aware of a frisson of stance-taking rippling through our group. There were those who regarded

It’s probably escaped most people’s attention, what with the football, the election, the Ukraine war, the horrors of Gaza, the assassination attempt and the revelation that the most powerful human on the planet has the intellectual sharpness of a daffodil. But in the past few weeks, the world of travel has been roiled by a surprising innovation: Michelin stars for hotels. Though the stars are stylised as ‘keys’. This may not seem like big pommes de terre, but it is quite important. Because, if the concept takes off and hotels start striving for Michelin accolades, then we can expect the best and most ambitious to go the same way as