Travel

The dangerous charm of Peter Matthiessen

In 1951, the American author Peter Matthiessen moved to Paris. The scion of a wealthy Wasp family, he had studied at Yale and served in the navy, narrowly missing the second world war. He was then recruited to the CIA by James Jesus Angleton and sent to Paris, where he kept tabs on left-wing French intellectuals and expat Americans. As he later explained in a letter to a friend: When you’re 23, it seems pretty romantic to go to Paris with your beautiful young wife to serve as an intelligence agent and write the Great American Novel into the bargain. Weren’t you ever as young and dumb as that? While

I left my heart – and my dignity – in Belfast

Call me crazy, but I’ve always loved Belfast. Even when it was grim, scary and unlovable, I loved Belfast. It doubtless helped that when I came to know it, I was courting a local girl. I loved it because she loved it and, well, I loved it even after she chucked me. The people, the bars, the craic – gosh, the very air – invariably get under my skin. I’ve always felt at home in the city’s embrace. And now that Belfast is no longer grim, scary and unlovable – and long since my Colleen came to love another and long since I came to love another too – I

Hell is other tourists in Antarctica

My first love was a penguin. Pengwee was an adorable brown and white emperor chick who had my heart and broke it the day he dived into the bath. After a week in the airing cupboard he smelled of fish – surprising in a soft toy. But then penguins are surprising. Towards the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago in Zealandia, a fragment of the Gondwana supercontinent, penguins waddled off along their own evolutionary path. Other birds flew through air; penguins flew through water. Natural selection pi-pi-pimped up the penguin (sorry) to astonishing specialisation. Hunting in black oceanic deeps, many species can see in ultraviolet. Kings and

Cigarettes and currywurst in Big Berlin

I’m standing at a bar in a car park on the rooftop of a shopping centre. I ask the bartender if the beer on draught is big or small. ‘That depends on your definition,’ he says. ‘What is big? What is small?’ The oonce-oonce of German trance music makes it hard to hear, and I’m distracted by the solitary figure on the dance floor wearing all black and contorting her body into the shape of a pretzel. ‘Is the beer groß or klein?’ I shout. The bartender – who is well over 50 and has the fashion sense of a Green Day groupie from 2005 – just smirks and says,

How to survive Florence with your family

There are many destinations which spring to mind when considering the options for a weekend away with a young family. There are beaches by the dozen, theme parks and glamping opportunities galore. But there is only one Florence. And I cannot say this strongly enough: when it comes to the kids, the Center Parcs of the Renaissance will not let you down. It begins with Tuscany itself, a place so beautiful that you can get Stendhal syndrome on the bus on the way from the airport. And even if your children are glued to their screens, eventually motion sickness will force them to look up and they may glimpse its

The Mediterranean summer holiday is broken

For more than 60 years it has been an annual fixture for thousands of us, a birthright enjoyed and embraced by the children of modern, pleasure-seeking, throw-away Britain. Precisely when it happened, I couldn’t say, but at some point in the 1950s or 1960s, the trains radiating from the metropolis to the coastal resorts of Clacton-on-Sea, Southend-on-Sea, Bournemouth, Frinton, Brighton and beyond stopped heaving with Londoners. In their place a whole series of new, hitherto unfamiliar resorts zoomed into the national consciousness, heralded by the tang of aviation fuel and the promise of neverending heat and chilled cerveza. Benidorm, Alicante, Tenerife, Torremolinos and Lanzarote were the new Clactons, Margates and

The stress-busting powers of the Arizona desert

‘Sit up straight, heels down, lean forward, lean back, tighten the reins, loosen the reins.’ Joe’s instructions replay in my head as I scan the canyon floor for rattlesnakes. I gently push my heels into the sides of my horse, Rio, and he sets off across the rocky terrain. Joe is my guide and a real-life cowboy. Guiding tourists like me through Arizona’s Sonoran Desert is his side hustle. I’ve signed up for a two-hour sunset trail ride, but Joe tells me he often takes groups into the desert for days. They sleep under the stars, catch fish for supper and eat fruit from barrel cacti. Joe can tell I’m

The politics of nudity

A recent, rather beautiful piece published here told of how the writer, Druin Burch, initially somewhat alarmed by the variety of naked bodies he unexpectedly encounters while swimming in the Med (‘I wouldn’t mind if it was only young women,’ he says to his wife) comes to appreciate the loveable imperfection of the human form. I can’t say I’m with him on this. I totally understand fit women wanting to take their tops off in public as an expression of sheer high spirits; as a teenager, I used occasionally to do it. But humanity generally? Put it away, puh-leeze! As a resident of the fair city of Brighton and Hove,

All the fun of the feria: why August is the time to visit Málaga

If I were a doctor specialising in alternative treatments, and someone came to me feeling depressed, I wouldn’t send them off with a herb-based elixir or a bunch of St John’s Wort. I wouldn’t cleanse their chakras or refer them to an acupuncturist. I’d send them off to Málaga’s annual fair, which this year runs from 16 to 23 August. Summer in Andalusia is feria season – the best cure that I know of for a bout of the blues. Usually lasting three or four days, or an entire week in the regional capitals, ferias are occasions of pure alegria (joy) and inclusivity. Happiness is taken very seriously in Spain,

Why truck stop cafés trump motorway service stations

There’s something about motorway service stations that seems to encourage the very worst in human behaviour. They’re places where no doubt usually responsible members of society have long decided that it’s permissible to drop semi-industrial amounts of litter on to the verges, urinate all over the toilet floor and belch with impunity while queuing up for a Whopper at Burger King. For me, it was the full-to-the-brim child’s nappy that someone had left on a chair in the revolting ‘sit down café’ at a services near Preston that made me decide that I would never set foot in a Welcome Break, Moto or Roadchef ever again. I’m lucky; I have

How Cowes found the secret of a successful seaside resort

These days, most English seaside towns are sites of national mourning. You pay your respects by walking up some deathtrap pier, dropping two pence in an arcade coin pusher and whispering, your flower now on the grave: ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ But Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, has managed to stave off this sorry end. Its secret is Cowes Week. Cowes Week, which starts today, is an annual sailing regatta. It has earned its place as a respected event in Britain’s sporting calendar – always in August, between Glorious Goodwood and the Glorious Twelfth – but its beginnings were unambitious. On 10 August 1826, following an advertisement

Admit it: no one really likes eating fish

As I sit under the sole tree on a Spanish beach, watching my fellow Brits shudder at the writhing horror show contained in the restaurant’s seafood display, it strikes me the middle classes don’t actually much like the dead-eyed edibles under the waves – we’re just conditioned to pretend to because eating them is supposedly chic. Sure, we extol fish as a sustainable and sophisticated source of high-quality protein, vitamin D and what sounds like K-pop’s next girlband, omega-3. It’s the well-informed, thinking man’s dinner, akin to choosing a Tesla before Elon Musk’s meltdown phase. But let’s be honest: the glassy stare (I’m still talking about the fish), the slimy

How not to behave at a London gentleman’s club

After a 5 a.m. start, I arrived at the departure gate in Nice airport to discover there was an air traffic control strike and my flight had been delayed by two hours. Annoyance gave way to relief when the board turned red and all later flights were cancelled. This was the week of the Spectator summer party and, because of work commitments and for reasons of economy, I was flying back at 5 p.m. the following day. I was packing a lot into those hours: on arrival a late lunch in Pimlico, where I was staying in a flat belonging to a friend, Kate, who was away; the party; a

The other side of Yemen

In the western imagination, Yemen exists as a byword for terrorism and death. Its appearances in international headlines are flattened into a trilogy of suffering: Houthis, hunger, hopelessness. The civil war has dragged on for over a decade, leaving much of the nation in ruins. Life is punishing for the millions who navigate daily existence amid chronic instability. The Houthis – entrenched in the capital, Sana’a – continue to tighten their grip on power in the northwest. Their attacks on Red Sea shipping have drawn international reprisals and fuelled regional tensions. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office still advises British nationals against travelling to the country. Yemen is not therefore

The remote Spanish wine region that rivals Rioja

A.E. Housman once wrote that the English villages of Clunton and Clunbury, Clungunford and Clun ‘are the quietest places under the sun’. He’s almost right. I grew up in Clunton and the only place I’ve felt a deeper sense of quiet is Escaladei, a village high up in the mountainous Priorat region of Spain, which is home to the Cellers de Scala Dei vineyard. Getting there from Barcelona isn’t for the faint of heart, as the roads weave erratically along the hillsides. Driving there, I gripped the steering wheel tightly and drowned out my fears with music from a local reggaeton station. Once safely at the vineyard, Roger, our guide,

With glee to the silvery sea

Was it more profitable for an early-20th-century seaside railway poster to promise the undeliverable or to be slightly less enticing but at least tell the truth? In his charming and unashamedly train-spotterish book about how the British travelled to the seaside in the great days of rail, Andrew Martin quotes slogans from posters. The Great North of Scotland Railway described the Moray Firth as ‘the Scottish Riviera’. The Furness Railway named Grange-over-Sands ‘the Naples of the North!’ (The exclamation mark injected a smidgeon of doubt, Martin feels). More realistic companies toned down their boasts. The LNER decided it should go no further than claim it took passengers to ‘The Drier

Could a secretive Swiss clinic cure my bad habits?

Having just turned 65, I enjoyed a week of firsts. My first ever facial and my first ever yoga class progressed to my first ever impedancemetry session, my first ever photobiomodulation session, my first ever hyberbaric chamber session, my first ever cryotherapy session, my first ever sensory deprivation session, my first ever neurofeedback session and my first ever revitalising wave session. I was at the Nescens Clinic Centre for Aesthetic and Regenerative Medicine near Geneva, marking my milestone birthday by attempting to defy age. It was Mrs Ray’s idea. Concerned that I was beginning to look and act like the old soak that I am, she wanted them to break my

Why you should never trust a travel writer

After one of Jeffrey Archer’s minor tangles with the absolute truth, his friend the late Barry Humphries remarked: ‘We all invent ourselves to some degree. It’s just that Jeffrey has taken it a little further than most.’ The remark came to mind last week as the media storm over the veracity (or otherwise) of the Winns’ account in The Salt Path reached its peak. As Dame Edna might have said, all travel writing is invented to some degree. It’s just that Raynor and Moth may have taken it a little further than most. ‘In Patagonia?’ Bruce Chatwin’s lodger is said to have remarked of the eponymous book. ‘I doubt Bruce

Britain fought on the wrong side of the first world war

It’s more than two months since I returned from Dublin, and at last the hangover is beginning to fade. I flew out with our team at The Rest is History to record a series about the Irish War of Independence and Civil War. Our guests were Paul Rouse, a professor at University College Dublin and former manager of Offaly’s Gaelic football team, and Ronan McGreevy, an Irish Times journalist and author of a terrific book about the murder of Sir Henry Wilson. On the first night Ronan took us for an excellent curry; on the second, Paul organised a pub crawl. Well, I say a crawl, but in truth we

The slow delights of an OAP coach tour

Early on Monday mornings, in service stations across the country, armies of the elderly are mustering. These are the OAPs about to embark on motor coach tours to the Norfolk Broads, Cornish fishing villages, the Yorkshire Moors and Welsh ghost towns, organised by men in blazers consulting clipboards, like Kenneth Williams in Carry On Abroad. There will be cream teas, along with river cruises, coastal excursions, scenic drives and jaunts on steam railways. I am a devotee of these charming holidays, as invented by Wallace Arnold, even though when one first catches sight of one’s fellow travellers it’s a frightening vision of what’s up ahead: the sticks, walking-frames, mobility scooters,