Travel

Thursday

Susan Hill

French Notebook

An overnight stop on the Ile de Ré taken between the St Malo ferry and the Quercy, where we always spend June, reminds one how closely French history lives entangled with modern life. Sleek hotels, harbours full of private boats, overpriced gift and fashion boutiques are cheek by jowl with ancient monuments and fortifications, in streets of small stone houses so narrow that the ubiquitous bicycles barely get through. Amid the massed tourists here, they still cultivate vines, mine salt and grow potatoes to send over toute la France. The mussels and lobsters remind me of home in north Norfolk and the pretty cottages are freshly painted white with pale

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 2 July 2015

Bank job Should we buy shares in companies which print banknotes in expectation of one getting to print millions of drachma notes? — In May, according to the ECB, there were a total of 17.6bn euro notes in circulation. Given that Greece accounts for approximately 2.5% of the GDP of the eurozone, 441m of these were Greek, and might need replacing with drachma notes in the event the country leaves the euro. — However, there is already a good business in printing replacement euro notes. In May, 2.76bn notes were taken out of circulation and 2.88bn new ones were put into circulation. — Therefore, if Greece were to leave the

Justin Marozzi

Don’t abandon Tunisia!

Just as a pilgrimage to Mecca is a holy obligation for all Muslims, it should now be a patriotic duty for as many Brits as possible to holiday in Tunisia. I say this not to make light of the tragic attack on the beach at Sousse last week, but to urge everyone to show the terrorists that they cannot win. They want to terrify us and shut down Tunisia’s resurgent tourist trade. They want to turn it into a failed state, a recruiting ground for lobotomised self-detonators. What better reaction could there be for those untouched by this attack than to laugh at our enemies and board the next flight to Hammamet?

Thursday

Patrick West

Flanders

Usually, one of the first indications that you’ve entered a bilingual country is that the road signs are in two languages. At least this is the case in Ireland or Wales — but not in Belgium. In Flanders, the signs are written in Dutch. In Wallonia, they are all in French. French is spoken in Flanders, by the small local Francophone community, but more notably by the huge number of French people who descend on Brugge for the Christmas sales. The French registration plates and the gaggle of overly loud wanderers with cameras are giveaways, but don’t even think about trying French here yourself. It’s considered rude if it’s not

Sara Wheeler

Into the blue

Jenny Balfour Paul is an indigo dye expert. She has written two books on the subject, and lectures around the world. A librarian alerted her to the mention of the colour, and the plant it comes from, in the journals of a long-forgotten sailor and indigo hand. That day a ten-year love affair began. Thomas Machell was born near York in 1824, a son of the manse. At the age of 16 he went to sea, scrubbing the decks of a merchant ship. After numerous adventures he settled in India, initially working for the Bengal Indigo Company, then transferring to plant and harvest coffee in Kerala. He was a curious,

Thursday

Guy Dammann

Country house opera

I stole a blanket last night. Rather a nice one, in fact. I feel bad about it, of course, but guilt is less inconvenient than pneumonia; and after trying to blow-dry my waterlogged dinner jacket with the winds howling through Garsington Opera’s ‘airy’ pavilion, it seemed like pneumonia or the blanket were the options. Forgive the melodramatic, self-justificatory tone. That, too, has its roots in the evening’s diversions, which included a performance of Intermezzo, Richard Strauss’s melodramatic and self-justificatory autobiographical account of a marital misunderstanding. It’s an odd piece, lovely in some ways, trite and misogynistic in others. Some decades ago, after a May Day ball in Oxford, I learned

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 28 May 2015

Steam privatisation Cunard celebrated its 175th birthday by sailing three liners down the Mersey. The formation of the Cunard Line was an early triumph of privatisation. — The Post Office had been operating a monthly service to New York with sailing brigs since 1756. In 1836 a parliamentary committee decided that a steamship service should replace it, and that it would be more efficient for the Admiralty to put it out to tender to private operators. — Samuel Cunard defeated the Great Western Steamship Company and the St George Steam Packet Company by offering a fortnightly service from Liverpool for an annual subsidy of £55,000. The service, which at first only

Katy Balls Katy Balls

St Moritz

Here’s a tip: when travelling to St Moritz, it’s best not to mention the name of your final destination to the airport porters, drivers or waiters that you encounter on your journey there. Such a slip, as I discovered, will only lead to disappointment when you come to leave a tip (however generous the amount may be). Once the star of Switzerland’s winter tourism, St Moritz is the original alpine resort, offering ski holidays to the super-rich since 1864. But in recent decades the town’s sparkle has begun to fade, as it now has to compete with the likes of Klosters and Gstaad for the custom of royals, oligarchs and

Thursday

William Cook

Antwerp

Napoleon didn’t think much of Antwerp. ‘Scarcely a European city at all,’ he scoffed. If only he could see it today. Ten years ago, Antwerp felt provincial. Now it feels like the capital of an (almost) independent state. ‘Jardin Zoologique’ it says outside the zoo, but that’s the only French signage you’ll see in this resolutely Flemish city. When they built the zoo, in 1843, Belgium was only 13 years old, and French was the official language throughout this mongrel nation. Now it only survives on a few old war memorials. ‘You’re in Flanders now,’ locals tell you, if you try to speak to them in French. Each time I

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Calling all British tourists – Ukraine needs you!

 Kiev ‘What the hell’s going to happen to your poor country?’ I ask the man in the flea market not far from St Sophia cathedral (Delingpole tourist rating: total must-see). ‘What do you think?’ I shrug. ‘Partition, maybe.’ The man shrugs back. We agree that what Putin is doing in the east is appalling. But he’s not terribly enthused by what the Americans are doing either. ‘They want to arm us. But you know where the fighting will take place: here,’ he says, meaning Ukraine in general rather than Kiev in particular. ‘You could leave,’ I suggest. ‘Your English is good.’ (Unusually so. Communication is generally quite hard in Kiev

Thursday

Margaret Kemp

Marseille

If you haven’t been lost in Marseille then you can’t have been there. As Alexandre Dumas wrote, this is a place that is ‘always getting younger as it grows older’. But while you’ll certainly be lost at some point, you won’t be stuck and you won’t be bored. You can meander through the 16 contrasting neighbourhoods, or cross the town easily via metro, bus, bike, tram or even ‘Le petit train de Marseille’ — the Marseille fun train. Head straight to the Old Port (600 bc) where Foster and Partners’ mirrored canopy (2013 ad) gleams in the hot sun, then up the hill to the lovely, listed Intercontinental Hotel Dieu

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 23 April 2015

Enemies within Sir: I thought Matthew Parris was typically incisive in his last column, but perhaps not quite as much as the person who wrote its online headline, ‘Scotland knows the power of a common enemy. We English don’t’ (18 April). It is true that ‘the wish to be the underdog’ is a defining urge of our age, even in relatively prosperous polities such as Scotland and Catalonia. But Parris is wrong when he claims that the closest the English come to the ‘Braveheart feeling’ is in their collective memory of the second world war. If only that were true. Would any other country make so little of its crucial

Thursday

Claudia Massie

Møn

The sky over the island of Møn, which is at the bottom right of Denmark, was cobalt and the whitewashed walls of the Elmelunde church dazzled in the bright sunshine and hurt our eyes. Our arrival had been preceded by an argument about visiting the church at all, some of the party being of the opinion that they had seen enough medieval churches already during the four-week trek across northern Europe. Nevertheless, culture won the day and in we filed to glory in the frescoes of the Elmelunde Master, who some time during the 15th century devoted himself to the decoration of this church. The frescoes are spare and sinuous,

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Did the £20 million Norwegian’s pay row make BG cheaper for Shell?

Helge Lund was widely expected to go into domestic politics when he ended his successful tenure as head of Statoil, the Norwegian state oil and gas company. Instead, he was hired to run BG Group, the troubled former exploration arm of British Gas, but on a promise of such ludicrously rich terms — up to ten times his Statoil salary — that shareholders, the media and Vince Cable howled in protest. An embarrassed BG board had to scale back the offer, though it remained pretty fat and as I wrote at the time, ‘no mention of Lund, however good he turns out to be, will ever omit a jibe at

Thursday

Jonathan Ray

The first Spectator cruise

It’s a complete recipe for disaster of course. By which I mean being trapped at sea with The Spectator’s ‘Low life’ correspondent for an entire week. That’s seven whole days. At sea. Crikey! Not that Jeremy Clarke isn’t the best of company (he is — everyone adores him) and not that we won’t all have the hugest of fun. After all, Cunard’s Queen Victoria has at least a dozen different watering holes to keep us (and JC) happy, from the Golden Lion pub to the swanky Commodore Club for pre- and post-prandial cocktails. No, it’s just that I fear hangovers of Wagnerian proportions, appalling damage to my liver and —

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Why plane crashes are getting weirder

In the late 1980s, the parks service in the United States were concerned about the deterioration of the stonework on the Lincoln Memorial. So they asked the maintenance staff why the stone was decaying. The crew explained that they used high-power sprays every fortnight to clean the masonry. The water penetrated cracks and joins, weakening the stone. But they needed to spray to get rid of the large volume of bird droppings. So they erected bird nets. These scarcely worked, and were unpopular with tourists, so the parks service called in the maintenance workers again and asked, ‘Why are there so many birds?’ ‘The birds come to feed on the

James Walton

Comics’ trip

Who says British television lacks imagination? You might have thought, for example, that every possible combination of comedian and travel programme had been exhausted long ago. After all, it’s now 26 years since Michael Palin set the trend by following in Phileas Fogg’s footsteps (sort of). In more recent times, we’ve had Stephen Fry going round America in a London taxi, Billy Connolly going round Australia on a Harley-Davidson trike and — perhaps drawing the short straw — Ade Edmondson going round Britain in a caravan. There’s also been Paul Merton in India, Sue Perkins in China, Sean Lock and Jon Richardson in the Deep South and… well, you get

Thursday

Mark Mason

Tourists are trickling back to Egypt – to beat the crowds, go now

Egypt’s revolution of 2011 didn’t just get rid of President Mubarak: it did a pretty good job of clearing out the tourists, too. The political uncertainty since then has made people wary of visiting — meaning more space and lower prices for those who do make the trip. But you’d better be quick if you want to take advantage: this seems to be the year that Egypt is opening up again. BA are resuming their Sharm el-Sheikh flights in September, while Abercrombie and Kent are back up to three boats for their Nile cruises (they had been down to one). I started in Aswan, home to the alarmingly named Hotel

Mark Palmer

Letter from Cuba: The tourists are coming – but don’t expect Walmart just yet

Sloppy Joe’s — which starred in the film of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana — was always likely to wither on the post-revolution vine. As the decadent hangout of unsavoury ‘imperialists’ whom Fidel Castro despised, it never stood much of a chance. Frank Sinatra, John Wayne and local hero Ernest Hemingway all used to call in from time to time, slaking their thirst at the 65ft-long mahogany bar. It closed in 1960 and no one expected to see mojitos and daiquiris being poured here again, at least not until Fidel and his brother Raúl were gone. But needs must. Double measures and double standards keep Cuba alive. Two years ago,

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Airport wars: why I’m betting on Gatwick

Easter is a good time to talk about airports — or perhaps a bad time, if you bought your Spectator in the shopping labyrinth that impedes your path to the departure gate after a maddening wait in the security queue, where only a quarter of the scanners are working. I’m with you, and not just in spirit: in fact, that’s me being led away by men with machine guns, after an altercation over the contents of my wash-bag. It’s a curious fact that no one has ever succeeded in imbuing airport terminals with the romance, dignity and passenger satisfaction quotient of 19th-century railway stations. At best they are soulless, at