William Cook

As winter drags on and on, and warm sunny days become distant memories, discussions in our family always turn to summer holidays. We only go away together once a year so our trip has to tick all the boxes. My daughter won’t fly long haul, my son craves excitement, I like exploring places that are off the beaten track and my wife just wants to drop and flop. It’s a tricky combination but, as we’ve found out down the years, there are plenty of European seaside towns in unexpected places – places where you can do all the usual seaside stuff and still have a few adventures while you’re there. Here are our family favourites, plus a couple of offbeat resorts I’ve ended up in on my travels for The Spectator.

Now travel restrictions are finally easing off, there’s never been a better time to visit Europe’s greatest galleries. Sightseers won’t be back en masse for a good while yet, I reckon. in the meantime, you’ll be able to wander round these places in comparative peace and quiet. I was back in Berlin last month, and it felt wonderful to stroll through tranquil museums that are usually so crowded. It made me impatient to return to other Continental capitals, and revisit some of the precious masterpieces I’ve grown to love. You’re bound to have your own favourites, but here’s my magnificent seven. AmsterdamImage: iStock The Rijksmuseum is a must, but, as in all big galleries, it pays to be selective.

‘Why not be a teacher?’ asks Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s great play A Man for All Seasons. ‘You’d be a fine teacher, perhaps a great one.’ ‘If I was, who would know it?’ says Richard Rich, the young man who betrays him. ‘You, your pupils, your friends — God,’ says More. ‘Not a bad public, that.’ I’ve been thinking about those lines a lot since the finest teacher I ever knew, Audrey Judge, died. Audrey was 93. The last time I saw her was before Covid. She died of cancer during lockdown. She taught art at Haberdashers’ Aske’s in New Cross — formerly a state grammar school, now a state academy. She could have been a great artist. Instead she became a great teacher.

Europe is opening up again, and it feels great to be back in Switzerland, my favourite holiday destination. Most Britons think of it purely as a place for winter sports, but midsummer here is glorious. I’ve come here virtually every year for the last 20 years, and although it’s gorgeous in winter I like it even more in summertime. The wooded hills and lush green valleys are full of hikers and mountain bikers, but it’s easy to escape the crowds. Even in the busiest places, solitude is only a short walk away. Switzerland has some of the most spectacular landscapes in the world, and the summers here are hot and sunny. The lakes are warm enough to swim in, yet the air remains fresh and cool. So why don’t more Brits come here in summer?

Here in a quiet corner of leafy Surrey, a polite revolution is taking place: a public gallery is daring to display the most unfashionable sort of art you can imagine. Here you’ll find no pickled sharks, no unmade beds, only Victorian and Edwardian figurative painting. Welcome to Watts Gallery, one of the most beautiful galleries in Britain, and, in its own unassuming way, one of the most radical venues in the country. Hidden in a wooded glade near the quaint village of Compton, Watts Gallery has all the ingredients for a perfect Sunday afternoon outing. You can poke around the posh gift shop, or pig out in the teashop (their Welsh Rarebit is delicious) or simply sit outside in the sunshine and watch the world go by.

I’m standing in a farmyard in Somerset, drinking in the clear country air, soaking up the summer sunshine and marvelling at the lovely view. However this view is rather different from the sort of thing you tend to see on most farms. I’m here to see some modern art, stuff my face and enjoy a stroll round the stunning gardens. Welcome to Durslade Farm, the grooviest art gallery in the West Country, and one of my favourite days out. Durslade is the brainchild of Swiss couple Iwan and Manuela Wirth. Together with Manuela’s mother, leading art collector Ursula Hauser, they run one of the world’s hippest galleries, Hauser & Wirth. Hauser & Wirth have premises all around the world, in swanky locations like Monaco, St Moritz, Zurich, Hong Kong, New York and LA.

Tonight, Gareth Southgate’s England team have the opportunity to do something the Three Lions haven’t done for 55 years - reach the final of a major football tournament - and the most thrilling thing for England fans is the number of young players coming through. This isn’t just a team for this year, or the World Cup in Qatar next year, or even the next Euros in three years time. Many of these players are young enough to play for England for ten years to come. England’s starting line-up against Ukraine only featured one player over 30, and three players in their early twenties (Jadon Sancho, 21, and Declan Rice and Mason Mount, both 22).

When my wife suggested a holiday in Ibiza, I thought she must be bonkers. I’d always hated clubbing, and now we had a baby and a toddler in tow. Shows how much I know. We went, we had a great time and the only clubbers we encountered were in the kids’ club at our hotel. That was 17 years ago, I’ve been back several times since then, and now the Balearics are on the green list we can’t wait to return. Our children are almost grown up now, far too cool to tag along, but it’ll be an ideal break for the two of us. I bet you’d love it too.

Tourists take the cable car to the Top of the Rock to pester the monkeys that live at the summit, but the best thing about this clifftop arena is the view. Standing on the cliff edge, gazing down at the big ships traversing the busy strait below, you realize what makes Gibraltar so important. Spain lies behind you, Morocco lies ahead. To your left is the Mediterranean and, on your right, the wild Atlantic. This is the bridgehead between Africa and Europe, the gateway between the Old World and the New. No wonder Britain has always been so determined to hold onto it. Whoever controls the Rock controls this narrow strait and all the traffic that passes through it, about a quarter of the world’s shipping.

As we all discovered during lockdown, going for a walk is one of the best things you can do to keep your mind and body in good working order, and for me it’s even better if there’s some artistic or literary interest en route. Some of my favourite outings over these last few years have been spent following in the footsteps of artists and writers, and now Britain is opening up again it’s the ideal time to get back on the cultural trail. Here are a few of my favourite arty walks. I’d love to hear about some of yours.

With foreign travel still a tricky prospect, it looks like being a bumper summer for the British seaside. And yet that means the most popular places are bound to get very busy indeed. To avoid the queues and traffic jams, I’ll be revisiting some of Britain’s less familiar seaside towns. Of course, these places are very familiar to folk who are lucky enough to live nearby, but they don’t attract the bumper crowds you get in big resorts like Blackpool or Skegness. Nor are they terribly fashionable, like Padstow or St Ives. Some of them are a bit offbeat, but they’re all places where I’ve had great days out. You’re bound to have your own favourites, but if you fancy trying somewhere new this summer, here’s my personal top ten.

‘It would be very nice just to put sculpture on hillsides or in small valleys - for everyone to enjoy,’ said the great British sculptress Barbara Hepworth. When she died, in 1975, her vision was just a pipe dream. Despite a fine sculptural tradition and countless acres of glorious parkland, there were no dedicated sculpture parks in Britain, just a few statues in the grounds of stately homes. Half a century later, what a lot has changed! Today Britain has loads of super sculpture parks, there’s bound to be one not far from you, and while visits to indoor galleries remain restricted, now is the ideal time to go. Seeing sculpture in a sculpture park is completely different to seeing it in a gallery. Personally, I far prefer it.

What’s the thing that’s kept you going during these interminable lockdowns? For me, it’s been walking in my local forest, Ruislip Woods. Ruislip may be the acme of suburbia, a maze of bungalows and crazy paving - but Ruislip Woods is only a short walk away, and it’s vast. As I’m sure you’ve discovered yourself these last few months, there’s nothing quite like a walk in the woods to alleviate the lockdown blues. It feels great to go somewhere entirely unaffected by Coronavirus, a place where this pesky pandemic seems utterly inconsequential. A forest is a precious place in any part of the country, but to me Ruislip Woods feels particularly special because it’s managed to survive despite being entirely within London.

Finally, at long last, it seems we can start thinking about summer holidays - maybe even a short Easter break, if the Covid numbers keep coming down. However booking anything overseas still looks like a tricky prospect, so this year I’ll be renewing my acquaintance with the Great British Seaside. Like a lot of people who grew up before budget flights made foreign travel affordable, I didn’t go abroad until I was 18. And so, during my cash-strapped childhood, I got to know the British seaside pretty well. I didn’t spend much time there in my twenties, but once I had children of my own I began to make up for lost time. Taking my kids to these seaside resorts made me remember what fun I’d had there when I was a child.

When I first set eyes on Lake Geneva, 30 years ago, I was traveling across Europe with the woman who would become my wife. We’d traveled by train through Germany. We were now on our way to France, to a chalet in the Alps. That meant a change of trains in Lausanne, in Switzerland. We’d never been to Switzerland. We decided to stop off for the night. I can still recall my first view of the lake, from the window of our cheap hotel. I had no idea it was so vast. France was a faint blur across the water, framed by snowcapped peaks. We walked up to the cathedral to get a better look. There was a wedding party outside, showering two newlyweds with confetti.

If this were a normal January, free from the specter of COVID-19, Davos would be bracing itself for an invasion by several thousand of the world’s most self-important people: pompous politicians, slick CEOs and — worst of all — freeloading journalists. Normally this pretty Alpine town is the venue for the World Economic Forum in the last week in January, but this year that annual schmoozefest is safely confined to the internet. ‘Key global leaders will share their views on the state of the world in 2021,’ forewarns the WEF website but, for the first time in the WEF’s 50-year history, they’ll be doing it remotely. Due to the pandemic, Davos rests in peace.

Hurrah! At last the UK government has lifted quarantine restrictions for the Canary Islands, meaning British visitors no longer have to spend a fortnight in isolation when they get back to Blighty. Spanish authorities simply require you to take a rapid-result Covid test upon arrival. For sun-starved Britons, this is great news. Warm and sunny all year round, barely four hours away by plane, with all the mod cons of mainland Spain, the Islas Canarias are the ideal winter sunshine destination. I’ve been half a dozen times and each trip has been a blast. So which island should you head for? Well, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura are both dramatic, but the place I like best, and keep returning to, is Tenerife.