Spectator Life

‘A man who has not been in Italy,’ said Dr. Johnson, ‘is always conscious of an inferiority.’ With a 12-year-old daughter living there, I myself have avoided this fate. Yet, for all the trips back and forth to see her, I know little of the country, beyond noticing that the romance of Cinema Paradiso or the clowning of Roberto Benigni are, though one side of it, also highly misleading. There is a melancholy here, and a seriousness too. Recently I’ve been delving into books on Italy, to try to pierce my way beneath the surface. Not that surfaces are trivial to the Italians – most writers agree they’re paramount.

Delhi was hot, noisy and chaotic. As always. I’ve never liked the place. I pour with sweat, get grumpy and scratchy, and just want to go home. What I do like, though, is Delhi’s Imperial Hotel. It’s everything that the surrounding city isn’t, being cool, quiet and calm. I can cope with Delhi if I can stay here, thank you very much, largely because of its wonderful Hardinge Bar, surely the finest in town. I mean, have you ever tried its Imperial Saffron Negroni? It’s an absolute belter. And the eponymous Hardinge, made from whisky and marmalade, is a corker too. Sadly, I wasn’t in the Imperial long enough to do too much damage to the cocktail list. I was here simply to regroup before heading north.

Matteo Giovanardi was navigating a midlife crisis amid a failed marriage and needing shelter when he moved into a medieval tower in the northern Italian city of Bologna. Rising over a small piazza, the tower topped out at 60 metres, its floors dirtied by pigeon droppings, its walls blackened with the soot of ages. Seven years passed before Giovanardi moved out. For he had found in this tower – the Torre Prendiparte – not only shelter but a salutary mission. 'I needed to rinse away the pain, to imagine the rest of my life,' he tells me when I visit. 'It is not only bricks. Prendiparte is a magical place.' It was early in the 1990s when Giovanardi took up residence in the tower.

Each time I return to Berlin – that wonderful, awful city where I whiled away the best days of my misspent youth – I take a walk along the cobbled path that marks the route of the Berlin Wall. Half a lifetime since it came tumbling down, there isn’t much left to see. A few stretches have been preserved as memorials, but it’s mainly an absence not a presence – a ghostly gap between the backs of buildings, a fissure between past and present, between the hard truths of the last century and the uneasy ambiguities of today. Why do I persist with this melancholy Wanderung, year after year? Because a walk along the Mauerweg (as Berliners call that zigzag footpath) is the best way to take the temperature of this Faustian metropolis.

France versus Albion is always good sport. The latest instalment of the rivalry was settled conclusively with PSG’s recent victory over Arsenal. As for the wider comparisons, strewn with titanic clashes – the Hundred Years’ War, the Battle of Trafalgar, Liquorice Allsorts versus Carambar – I’m no expert but I did live in Paris for a couple of years and was intoxicated by it from the very first evening there, a January Saturday in foul weather with the normally placid Seine a broiling mess. But after moving back home I hadn’t returned until this year. Inevitably, the first thing you do upon rolling off the Dover to Calais ferry is start declaiming how much better the French do things than us.

I am sitting in the Ottoman courtyard at Ruin Adalya in the old town of Antalya, drinking a tulip glass of black sweet tea and munching near-perfect baklava, and twenty feet beneath me the Romans are still there. That is to say, the Ottoman courtyard is paved with Lycian limestone but sections of it are now made of glass, and through the glass I can see the old Roman road.  Which, as metaphorical launchpads go, will do very nicely. Yes, Antalya has, as many Brits know, fine beaches, serious resorts, agreeably cheap food and wine, and the odd Roman temple. But the history of this stretch of Mediterranean coast goes back further than that, and deeper, so much deeper. And I want to trace that extraordinary depth.

Train travel is so expensive these days, but £25,000? For that you get a couple of nights stay on board, with double bed, bathroom, sitting room, views down the track as it recedes into the distance and a rear balcony should you come over all Harry S. Truman.   This is the master bedroom on The Chairman’s Train, puffing into action in July as the UK’s first fully private heritage train for hire. And yes, for £45,000 - a day - you and your 15 guests can have the whole thing, its dining carriage and many comfy rooms pulled by the locomotive of your choice, electric, diesel or steam.

I was robbed in Tokyo recently, an experience as unexpected as it was distressing. Despite long years in London, plus decades of rough and ready globetrotting to some of the sketchiest places on earth, I have never been a victim in any of these notorious crime hotspots (I feel snubbed especially by London), but this was the second such experience in supposedly the safest city in the world.   What are the odds? The first time I dropped my wallet in a branch of the bargain bucket Don Quijote store and later received a phone call from the staff saying they had it, with ID cards intact but 50,000 yen gone. This time there was no phone call, it’s all gone, a similar amount of cash but far more worryingly, my entire suite of credit and ID cards.

I’ve been on holiday to a country that doesn’t officially exist. It has its own border, passport, flag, currency and army but no one recognises it – not even its main sponsor, Vladimir Putin. Transnistria is sandwiched between its proper motherland Moldova – which is itself really Romania – and Ukraine, which Putin thinks is part of his motherland. Confused? It doesn’t get any easier.  In 1992 there was a short war between the newly created state of Moldova and separatist, ethnic Russians which resulted in nearly 1,000 deaths and the breakaway ‘country’ (via a peace accord) policed by Russian ‘peacekeepers’.

What does Monte Carlo conjure up? A glamorous casino where fortunes can be won and lost, but mostly lost? Men in evening dress at baccarat tables with beautiful women standing by? A tax haven for the glitzy rich on the Cote d’Azur? Fabulous Belle Epoque buildings? A refuge for Edwardian English invalids to escape the cold? Grace Kelly? The Grand Prix?  It was here that Max de Winter met the girl who became the second Mrs de Winter at the beginning of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. ‘What do you think of Monte Carlo, or don't  you think of it at all?’ he asked her.

I had never thought much about longevity or even ageing. But once you hit your mid-50s, things shift in irritating ways: love handles become more stubborn, typefaces mysteriously blur, sports injuries take ages to heal and conversations in noisy restaurants start to become puzzles. You haven’t fallen apart but the factory settings no longer apply, and Philip Larkin’s poems increasingly seem more poignant than funny. I apparently am not the only man of a certain age to have had this realisation. Last September, at an autocrats’ conclave in Beijing, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, both 72, wondered aloud if they might be able to extend their lives and therefore prolong their reigns indefinitely.

A seagull’s screech can be heard over a mile from the coast. I reckon my seven-year-old daughter’s seagull impression carries twice that distance. We call her screeches ‘bunker-busters’ because they have been known to pierce through four storeys, a pillow and noise-cancelling headphones. Months of shattered hangovers, terrorised wildlife and fractious calls from neighbours have paid off, however, because last weekend we all piled into the car and drove from the East Midlands to the European Seagull Screeching Championship in Belgium to watch her compete.   This eccentric event, now in its sixth year, was founded by ecologist Claude Willaert with the aim of improving seagulls’ reputation (summed up by Claude as ‘Make Seagulls Sexy Again’).

Picture the scene: a field somewhere in the Midlands on a Tuesday evening. It has rained continuously for seven hours. You are in a tent that took 45 minutes and three minor altercations to erect. Inside, there is no room to stand. You are sitting on a bare groundsheet, shivering, staring at an unopened tin of beans and sausages with a broken ring pull. A friend, whose idea this was, is somewhere nearby — in their tent, also rethinking the collective decision to sleep in a field.  With Easter out of the way, we are now heading face-first into another camping season.

Sooner or later, Airbnb is going to change its name to Airb, partly because it takes less time to type, and partly because it is becoming a misnomer. Increasingly rarely is there a breakfast to go with your bed. I am walking from John o' Groats to Land's End at the moment, so I have been staying in a different town every night, save for when I have been on the hills in a tent, and not once so far has anyone offered me a fry-up. Only once have I been offered any breakfast at all. Neither, by the way, have I even seen anyone in most of the places I have been staying. All but one have been entirely remote-control operations with key codes and key safes. I am, therefore, getting quite nostalgic for the traditional B&B.

Before the cocoon I had never met a hotel I didn’t like. I thought all hotels were interesting. There was the hostel in the walls of old Jerusalem, so dirty I had to sleep in my clothes but riveting; the pale box in Oświęcim, Poland (Auschwitz in German) by the haunted square; the best hotel in Batumi, Georgia, pleased with itself because it was nearly an Ibis; the vampire-themed hotel which felt weirdly normal in the Carpathians; the lovely Narnian winter of Claridge’s. Then I stayed at the Zedwell Hotel near Piccadilly and I didn’t like it because there is nothing to like. It’s inside the Trocadero, the old Victorian pleasure palace, so it will have known a world of pain.

There are few things that look sadder than an abandoned football ground. I spent longer than I meant to sitting on a decaying bench looking out over the forest that was once the intended playing surface for the Stroitel Pripyat football club. The sky above was cerulean, cloudless and entirely still. The only life came from my hand-held Geiger counter which spluttered and crackled, telling me that I was in a territory that wasn’t fit for a stroll, let alone 90 minutes of lung-bursting athleticism.  Stroitel Pripyat ceased to be a club 30 years ago, just as they were about to move into the purpose-built Avanhard Stadium where I sat that afternoon.

Is any tourist attraction on earth really worth enduring a madding crowd to see? My mother, denied international travel for half her life by the Soviet state, made up for this deprivation by becoming the world’s most fanatically rigorous tourist. A major site left unseen or portion of a museum unexamined was, to her, as morally repugnant as leaving food on the plate or abandoning a book half-way through.   I, spoiled frequent flyer that I am, find crowds the ultimate holiday buzz-killer. Nowhere is this more true than in Rome, which clocked a record 52.92 million overnight visitors for the Papal Jubilee year of 2025 and, according to pre-bookings tracked by the local tourist board, is expecting even more tourists this summer.

Shortly before Christmas, I visited Australia for the first time. It’s quite some journey but I was fortunate enough to fly business class with Cathay Pacific – and very plush it was, too. On the first leg to Hong Kong (a mere 12 hours or so), I was just settling into my pod (they don’t call them seats) and was about to nod off when there was something of an altercation across the aisle. ‘I understood that wi-fi would be available for the entire journey,’ said a grumpy middle-aged man, who looked like he was from the Middle East. He might well have owned much of the Middle East for all I knew. ‘We’re sorry, sir,’ said the air hostess. ‘It should be up and running shortly. One of the crew is looking into it.

It is one of the world’s most remote corners – but Greenland is playing an increasingly important role in global affairs. In January last year, the island’s 57,000 residents became an object of desire for Donald Trump. ‘I think Greenland we'll get because it has to do with freedom of the world,’ declared the bombastic President. ‘I think the people want to be with us.’ Six weeks later, the people of Greenland duly gave their reply, crushing their pro-Trump party in an election centred on questions of independence. The ongoing struggle for control of the Arctic motivated Trump’s demands. The British government believes that the Arctic Circle will be ice free each summer by 2040; some experts predict it will be sooner.

Across the border from San Sebastian, just down the beach, is France. I never got over that. San Sebastian is so effervescent, so tropical, so fast, that its proximity to the surlier Gauls seems strange. French cooking is the best in the world and there is no point arguing. But somehow it’s been eclipsed by its neighbour on the Basque coast. Biarritz and Bayonne have nothing on this Spanish city that’s pretty much universally called the ‘culinary capital of the world’. Of course, it isn’t quite: that’s still Paris or maybe Tokyo. But San Sebastian might be the best place in the world to eat. There’s a difference. You can’t go to Paris just to eat: even by day two, un autre confit duck leg begins to make you feel sick.

Though I hadn’t lived there since 1998, when I was 16 and Bill Clinton was in power, I’d always defended America. Sure, it had flaws. Big ones. It had gun problems, drug problems, healthcare problems, race problems, problems winning wars. But, by Jove, it was still the end of the rainbow. It still had the highest concentration of good of any country on earth.  Then Donald Trump inaugurated a new era in which the US went weird, and not in a good way. Not only did the problems with opioids, guns, wars and healthcare only get worse, new catastrophic fault lines opened. The bizarre reign of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris was hardly a comforting interlude.

When was the last time you were shouted at by a stranger wearing a lanyard? Or spent hours in a crowded public space with low ceilings and no natural light? Or paid £8.50 for a Pret sandwich? I’ll wager it was in a British airport, the unnatural habitat of humiliation, discomfort and rip-offs. Not to mention ugliness, rudeness and inefficiency.  Airports do not have to be this awful. Traveling through Rome’s Fiumicino (officially Leonardo da Vinci) Airport, for example, is a joyful, uplifting experience. The place is full of light, superb espresso, fresh-made pasta, pizza and ice-cream. Hard-core junk food addicts can find a McDonalds and a KFC, but they’re tucked away in a corridor far from the glories of the Italian-only food court.  The shops are stunning.

Ballroom dancers, suicide cases, charlatans: Blackpool has them all. No place has so much possibility or holds so much of the British soul on one bright, windswept drag. I first came here for Conservative party conference, where the cognitive dissonance of pre-Coalition Tories in funeral suits and the reality of the country they sought to govern – love, loss and candyfloss – felt wild. Did these people even know each other? It turns out they didn’t. Then I came to watch Russell Brand pretend to be Jesus Christ at the Winter Gardens for people alienated enough to think Russell Brand is a viable alternative to anything. They all meditated together.