Lazy bays

 Barbados

Homesick by nature, I like my foreign places to be exotic but also to remind me of home. Barbados, for types like us, is the ideal holiday destination. Sea so warm you can loll in it for hours on end, and the charm of dusty rum shacks on hot afternoons — but also cucumber sandwiches for tea, and Sunday Matins in Anglican parish churches where they sing Victorian hymns. The cucumber sandwiches were a daily treat at our English family-owned hotel Cobblers Cove on the west coast. Afternoon tea in the drawing room is on the house, and that is only one touch among 1,000 or so that make staying there bliss. Others include: the welcome from the staff who whisk your luggage away and lead you to the indoor-outdoor bar where a uniformed barman with a dazzling smile mixes you a rum or fruit punch; gorgeous suites, like small self-contained flats, with verandahs where you can set and gaze at the Caribbean Sea from your chaises longues; a constant supply of pink-and-white-striped swimming towels; and a different flavour of specially baked bread from the bread basket each evening as you sip your wine by the waves. The novelist Sam Angus, who does the interior design and makes a point of employing local craftsmen and women to make the wickerwork and ceramics, has an eye for beauty and a feeling for simple pleasures, comforts and good taste that tallies with my own, so I was happy and not homesick. I love luxury — who doesn’t? — but I don’t like being separated from the normal world. Cobblers Cove isn’t surrounded by miles and miles of golf courses or anything like that. Though it’s a mini-paradise of gardens and sea, it’s on a normal road in a normal place, with yellow buses trundling past, picking you up if you want a reggae ride into Bridgetown.