Travel

I have just applied to fly around the moon. My chances of being selected are slim, but is it impossible? Hopefully the explosion of Elon Musk’s test rocket shortly after landing in Texas last week may have winnowed down the competition for a place on Yusaku Maezawa’s flight to the moon and back, scheduled for 2023. That Texas landing was in fact a success, proving it’s possible for a rocket of this size to launch and return intact: third time lucky, the first two rockets tested having exploded on impact. This one blew up too, but after safely landing, and what the report described as a ‘rapid, unscheduled disassembly’ was

Target practice The government hit its target of giving a first Covid vaccine to 15 million of the most vulnerable people by the middle of February. Some other government targets which have been met (sort of): — 100,000 Covid tests a day by the end of April. The government did claim to have achieved this — but did so by counting testing kits which had been posted out and not necessarily returned. — There was a rise of 7,600 people applying for teacher training courses last year, which meant that the government hit its target for secondary school teachers to the tune of 106% and primary school teachers by 130%.

Not for the first time, metropolitan-based commentators and MPs have proved themselves to be out of kilter with the wider population. But there is an especially interesting disparity over the government’s proposals for ten-year jail sentences for travellers who try to conceal they have travelled from one of 33 ‘red list’ countries in order to avoid hotel quarantine. The proposal caused outrage among Conservative MPs as well as legal commentators such as Jonathan Sumption. Sir Charles Walker, vice-chairman of the 1922 Committee, accused the government of going ‘full North Korea’. To wide astonishment, however, a YouGov poll has suggested that more than half of all adults think that a ten-year

January is when the difference between the rich and the poor becomes most evident. Whereas many people face a month plagued by the three Ds — debt, divorce and doldrums — the famous tend to take off for more clement climes. Simon Cowell famously frolics at the Sandy Lane Hotel in Barbados at the start of each new year, and I myself have spent many January days at the Ritz-Carlton — but only the one in Tenerife, because I believe in keeping it real. This winter, subdued British airports have also seen a mass exodus of a particular youth tribe recognisable by their bright white teeth and deep mahogany tans

By the 1980s, after decades of immense popularity, the great British holiday camp was in terminal decline. The huge camps founded by Billy Butlin and Fred Pontin — the chalets, the dining hall, the redcoats (Butlin’s) and bluecoats (Pontins) — were becoming passé. Now the few that remain have been rebranded as holiday villages. But why not bring them back? Surely old-fashioned camps had exactly what we need today: simplicity, gentle fun and a sense of community. They were about team effort, not atomised nuclear families. Above all perhaps, they had a sense of identity. And they were a life-changer for me. I recently came across an online video of

Rather like unpacking after a holiday, when you take unworn clothes from the case still neatly folded because the occasion to wear them didn’t arise, unshown film sequences from my travel programmes are carefully edited and stored. The cancellation of this year’s long trip along the Spice Route made us look at these stories again; with not much prompting we have made three whole programmes from them. In the few years since we made these series the world has changed. The champion wrestler in Mongolia, the softly spoken Mr Battulga, for example, has become president of that country. He told me of his plan to build an eco-city on the