Travel

Thursday

Mark Mason

Beautiful city, beautiful game…

The secret to keeping any relationship going is, of course, to see as little of each other as possible. We all know what familiarity breeds, so there’s no point pushing your luck. Imagine my delight, therefore, on discovering a holiday company that specialises in separating you from your other half while you’re away. Well, for a couple of hours anyway. Footballbreak.co.uk offers trips to European cities whose teams play the beautiful game particularly beautifully: Madrid, Munich, Paris and the like. As well as organising your flights and hotel, they also arrange tickets for the match. So while the female(s) of your party swan off to hammer the credit card, the

Thursday

Chris Mullin

Diary – 6 October 2016

Any day now, the government will make its long delayed announcement on whether a third runway should be built at Heathrow or Gatwick. Personally I am against both. During my 18 undistinguished months as an environment minister, I learned one thing about the aviation lobby: their appetite is voracious. They want more of everything. Runways, terminals, you name it. I also learned that in the end, often after initial resistance, governments always give way. Although from time to time industry representatives hint that they would be prepared to make concessions on the handful of night flights that come in over central London each morning, disturbing the sleep of several million

Philip Marsden

Over hill and dale

When it comes to speaking of foreign affairs, Rory Stewart is one of the few MPs who does not peddle bland abstractions. Many of his parliamentary colleagues inhabit a blah-blah land where terms such as ‘peace process’ and ‘international community’ have meaning. An upbringing in the Far East, where his father was a diplomat, as well as years spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, have given Stewart direct experience not only of nations but of town quarters, villages and individuals. Walking was his preferred method in Afghanistan, where he tramped across the country with a dog and a Punjabi fighting stick. The dog couldn’t keep up and died, but here for

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

A free vote on the Heathrow runway? Don’t be so wet, Prime Minister

Hinkley Point — for all its flaws and the whiffs of suspicion around its Chinese investors — has finally received Downing Street’s blessing. Meanwhile, ministers hold the party line that High Speed 2 will go ahead according to plan, backed by news that the project has already bought £2 billion worth of land; and investors hunt for shares in the construction sector that might benefit from the multi-billion-pound infrastructure spree widely expected in Chancellor Philip Hammond’s autumn statement. But still no decision on a new airport runway for London — the one piece of digger work, short of tunnelling under the Atlantic, that would signal Britain’s raging post-Brexit appetite for

Thursday

Oliver Balch

Writing on the fly

Bogotá airport, immigration form in hand. Tourist, migrant, businessman? Andrés Neuman ponders the descriptors, unsure which to tick. He opts for the second. ‘I’d like to be a migrant.’ The decision is telling, and frames much of what follows in this curious, delightful, if disjointed book. Neuman is hot property in contemporary Latin American literary circles. A former winner of Spain’s prestigious Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, he is tipped (by Roberto Bolaño, no less) to be one of a select ‘handful’ to take up where the ‘boom’ generation of Márquez, Cortázar, Fuentes and Borges left off. His widely acclaimed novel Traveller of the Century (his fourth book,

Mark Mason

The Douro Valley

They’re called quintas, Joana tells us, because the rich families who owned the land along this stretch of the Douro river used to let others work it in return for a fifth of the profits. And in this part of northern Portugal, ‘work’ means only one thing: wine. We’re here in the Douro Valley to learn more about it all, including this trip to Quinta do Bomfim, the winery where Dow’s port is made. The valley also produces Cockburn’s — but don’t worry, the Portuguese needed those TV adverts telling them that the Scottish name is pronounced ‘Co-burn’ too. The Americans just dispense with the ‘ck’ — hence James Coburn,

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 1 September 2016

Behind the cover-up Some facts about Burkinis: — The Burkini was invented by Ahedi Zanetti, a Lebanese-born Australian businesswoman, in 2004 after watching her niece trying to play netball in a hijab. — Muslim lifeguards started wearing them on Sydney beaches in 2007. — According to Zanetti, 40% of her customers are non-Muslim. — Two years ago, several swimming pools in Morocco were reported to have banned them for hygiene reasons. Drowning by numbers Five men drowned at Camber Sands in Sussex after being trapped playing football on a sandbank. Where did the 311 people who drowned in Britain last year die? Coast/beach 95 River 86 Out at sea 26

Tom Holland

Diary – 1 September 2016

European unions come and go. Back in 1794, one of the more improbable ones was founded when Corsica joined Britain as an autonomous kingdom under the rule of George III. It didn’t last long, and by 1796, after an ignominious Brexit from the island, the Corsicans once again found themselves under French rule. Today, the episode is chiefly remembered for the injury sustained by one particular officer during the initial British capture of the island: it was during the siege of Calvi that Nelson lost the sight in his right eye. ‘Never mind,’ he wrote to his wife, ‘I can see very well with the other.’ Naturally, as an appalling

Harry Mount

Bare ruined choirs

We’re so used to looking at the abbeys smashed up by Henry VIII — particularly Rievaulx and Byland, in north Yorkshire — that we forget quite how odd they are. It’s not just that they’ve been preserved as ruins for 500 years, although that’s odd enough in a country that’s only saved ruins properly for a century. What’s odder is that these vast structures were built in such remote spots. It’s like finding a ruined Westminster Abbey in the middle of nowhere. When the Cistercians left Clairvaux in Burgundy, they were so desperate for peace that they came all the way north to found Rievaulx in 1132, and Byland a

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

My fascist moment on the ship of failures

There are no roads from the Peruvian river port of Iquitos, but the rich take aeroplanes. Those who cannot pay to fly may pay the premium for the 40ft motorised express canoes that take only a day to roar to and from the upriver port of Yurimaguas with its bus station. But losers in the global race cannot afford speed. For them there are only the big, slow, hot, lumbering cargo boats: nearly four days’ journey from Iquitos to Yurimaguas. So the moment a passenger walks up the gangplank and strings their hammock between the iron rafters of the open–sided deck, we can guess he or she is not one

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

Mussolini at Lake Como

If your destiny is to be shot dead with your mistress, where better than Lake Como, which, in the words of Shelley, ‘exceeds anything I ever beheld in beauty, with the exception of the Arbutus Islands in Killarney’? It was in Giulino di Mezzegra, a tiny village in the mountains above the lake, that a handful of communist partisans executed the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and his mistress Claretta Petacci on 28 April 1945. The Duce was 61 and his amante 33 — two years older than his daughter Edda. The partisans loaded their corpses and those of other Fascist leaders — executed separately down by the lake — on

Thursday

Andrew Marr

Diary – 18 August 2016

Throughout our holiday, reports from Rio rippled in — last thing at night, first thing in the morning — a regular golden swoosh of heartwarming news. We are only an averagely sporty family, but these Olympics made us all happier. Across the media, there’s been a mild controversy about whether the remarkable achievements of Team GB say anything bigger about Britain — ‘We always punch above our weight’ — or very little; ‘Sport is sport and only sport, and that’s why we like it.’ But of course there are wider lessons. First, there was real, big long-term investment provided by the National Lottery and the foresight of Sir John Major.

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Magic at St Michael’s Mount

The Sail Loft is under a castle on a mountain on an island in the sea; for that, I could forgive it anything. It is on St Michael’s Mount in Marazion near Penzance, an island so charming and devoid of internet connection it almost strips me of words. If I lived here I would not write again; I would not need to. I would be happy, and who judges fish when they are happy and finds it not enough? It is accessible along a granite causeway for four hours each day — then the path goes back to the sea and one must take a boat; it is more ruthless

Toby Young Toby Young

Hurrah for Cornish holidays!

After the misery of going abroad for the summer holidays for the past few years, I’m now happily back in Cornwall. Caroline took some persuading. We used to come every year, but the combination of bad weather and cramped accommodation became too much for her. After a bad experience in a mobile home three years ago, she vowed ‘never again’ and we spent a week in Portugal in 2014 and then ten days in France last year. That was purgatory. The last straw was being un-able to order fresh fish at a seaside restaurant in the Languedoc. To get Caroline to reconsider, I had to splash out on a luxurious

Susan Hill Susan Hill

The perfect holiday cottage

‘Farm cottage available, Dorset. Long or short let. £5 per week.’ I was looking for a writing bolthole, so I rang. ‘Bit off the beaten track but it’s quiet all right,’ said the owner. It was also unfurnished. ‘We can get some basics together for you.’ So, in the summer of 1968, I drove down to Dorset and my first holiday cottage. It was backed by a large wood, surrounded by fields of dairy cows and meadows of wild flowers, bordered by elms. Remember elms? God’s finest trees. They whispered in the wind. Furniture. A deal table and chair. Cooker. Enough crockery, cutlery and utensils for one. An armchair, old

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Why lining shareholders’ pockets is more productive than plugging black holes

The revelation by actuarial consultants Lane Clark & Peacock that 56 of the supposedly blue chip companies in the FTSE 100 index are running deficits totalling £46 billion in their defined benefit pension schemes puts the BHS story into a new perspective. It tells us that the £571 million ‘black hole’ in the chain’s pension fund was by no means out of the ordinary — it is a small fraction of the deficits declared by the likes of BT, Tesco, BAE Systems and BP, even if it might have been mitigated by wiser decisions on the part of the scheme’s trustees and greater generosity on the part of former BHS owner

Thursday

David Gelber

The first favela

Where are you going?’ demanded the boy on the wall. A walkie-talkie clipped to his denim shorts crackled, but there was no sign of a weapon. ‘The English Cemetery,’ I answered. He slid down. ‘You need to go back that way. Take the road on the right.’ The street in question was a dustbowl where diggers flattened the ground for the tramlines that should have arrived in time for the Olympics. But no, he insisted, there was no way of reaching the cemetery through the favela. There are favelas and there are favelas, and the mesh of houses, shacks and alleys that extends across Morro da -Providência, above the English

Allan Massie

They’re all doomed

Night of Fire is Colin Thubron’s first novel for 14 years. For most of us he is better known as a travel writer, perhaps the finest of our time. But between journeys there have been seven previous novels, and this new one draws on his travelling. Ostensibly confined to a house converted into single apartments, and a night when it is consumed by a fire starting in its basement, it actually, in its chapters each devoted to one of its seven characters, wanders the world, while also moving to and fro in time. The seven characters are designated by role or occupation: landlord, priest, neurosurgeon, naturalist, photographer, schoolboy, traveller. We

Thursday

Toby Young

From cosy to crazy

I spent last weekend at Port Eliot in Cornwall, the only summer festival I’d pay to attend. Indeed, I ended up paying through the nose. Not only did I rent a teepee so that we wouldn’t have to lug our bell tent from the car park to the campsite and back, but I bought Caroline and our four children special wristbands so they could use the ‘posh loos’. I thought she’d get a particular kick out of swanning off with them to do their ablutions in the morning in the lap of luxury while I had to queue up to use one of the Portaloos. For those who’ve never had

Claudia Massie

Skye

Glamour. It’s Marcello Mastroianni drinking negronis on the Via Veneto; it’s Audrey Hepburn, George Clooney, Sinatra on the Vegas Strip in ’59… and a composting toilet on the west coast of Scotland. The latter was the only one available when I went glamping in Skye. Glamping is a neologism, an awkward portmanteau word that seeks to persuade us there really can be a satisfactory crossover between glamour and camping, even though most reasonable people have these two concepts pegged in different stratospheres. You can ‘glamp’ all over the place these days, in everything from yurts to airstream caravans, but to do it in Skye you must head to Skye Eco