Spectator Life

A Real Pain was one of my favourite films of recent years, a tragicomic exploration of family, history, place and identity featuring two Americans in Poland - specifically in Warsaw and Lublin.  My wife was also quite smitten - with Lublin as much as the film - and on the back of this began planning a weekend in the eastern Polish city. I was a little wary of such an overtly fan-like step - this felt one notch down from trying to emulate an influencer, of all the awful modern things. But she’s very good at arranging interesting weekends overseas on a miniscule budget so on this question I relented.

I have recently returned from a fleeting visit to the City of Light. As usual, Paris itself was a delight. It is an architectural and historic marvel that nevertheless manages to offer the best food and wine in the world at all kinds of prices, and somehow also has a respectable number of quirky and interesting independent shops and boutiques amidst the more anticipated international names. In other words, any trip to the French capital should be an alloyed pleasure. So why, when I arrived back at St Pancras, did I all but sink to my knees in gratitude that I was once back in rainy old Blighty, and that the land of the Belle Époque was a distant memory?

Loelia Lindsay, socialite and former wife of the 2nd Duke of Westminster, is said to have remarked: ‘Anybody seen in a bus over the age of 30 has been a failure in life.’ Well, I’m turning 59 soon and I still use buses. So, by that reckoning, success has so far not only eluded me but given me the widest possible berth.  In my defence, I live in Bristol, which has the worst congestion outside London. Driving here during rush hour is a kind of psychological torture. It’s also a war of attrition between the local council and motorists, with roadworks popping up overnight like molehills. Almost anything is preferable: walking, cycling or the bus. Admittedly, bus travel isn’t glamorous. There’s no bus equivalent of the Orient Express that I’m aware of.

It’s because I was on my own in Los Angeles, smoking weed on Venice Beach, that I ended up at Coachella Festival with two girls I’d barely met and the DJs Belle and Sebastian. It was because I was on my own in Nashville that I woke up with a Texan soldier and never had to tell anyone. And it’s because I was on my own driving up the west coast of England that I could take a spontaneous detour to Anthony Gormley’s ‘Another Place’ – just for the wonder of seeing those mossy, iron sculptures lapped by the waves.  Hell is other people – especially on holiday. Group trips give me chills. Words like ‘minibus’, ‘group tour’ or ‘kitty’ make me nauseous.

It’s the largest city in Europe, spans two continents, has been the capital of three mighty empires – Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman – and is visited each year by some 20 million tourists. These days – and I’m only guessing here based on the scores of battered, bloodied and bandaged scalps I spotted – it’s also the hair transplant capital of the world. Little wonder so many choose to come here for their cosmetic ‘enhancements’ (or ‘maimings’ depending on your view): if there’s one city that understands reinvention, it’s this one. I’m talking, of course, of Istanbul where continents and cultures, Christianity and Islam collide. To my shame, I’d never been before but, crikey, I loved it.

The problem with conventional ski holidays is that every day is more or less the same. You step eagerly out after your hotel breakfast to take the same ski-lifts and ski on the same slopes every day, and return to the same room every night. It can feel like a work commute, albeit a bit more fun.  Ski ‘safaris’, by contrast, offer a far less humdrum experience; but the terrain must be right. In the case of the Dolomites, a ski safari works precisely because the ski area is made up of loosely interconnected resorts with, crucially, a series of rifugi (mountain huts) high up on the slopes providing food and accommodation for an overnight stay.

Imagine going into an English pub and slapping a tenner down on the bar. ‘All I can drink, please,’ you say. ‘Certainly sir,’ says the barman. ‘You’ve got two hours.’ ‘Right then,’ you say. ‘I’ll start with a pint.’ Ten minutes later: ‘Whisky, please, no ice.’ Shortly afterwards: ‘I think I’ll have a Bloody Mary.’ Then: ‘Pint of that there. The green one. Please.’ Shortly afterwards. ‘Large white wine.’ And so the night wears on. You can have absolutely anything you like: cocktails, double G&Ts, rum and coke, Jack Daniels and Jack Daniels. Two hours is enough to render you senseless. You have drunk the equivalent of £100 of booze for £10, and you need a taxi, a chicken fajita and an urgent visit to the toilet.

I was in Scottsdale, Arizona and, to put it mildly, a little squiffy. Most folk go there to play golf (yawn) but I’d gone there to drink and, after a lengthy tequila masterclass in La Hacienda and several cocktails at Platform 18 (‘best US cocktail bar’ in the 2023 Spirited Awards, incidentally) in nearby Phoenix, I was also more than a little disorientated. No, don’t laugh. Firstly, La Hacienda – a fancy bar in the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess resort – has more than 240 different tequilas and mezcals on its list and, thanks to the resort’s resident Tequila Goddess (its term, not mine), they just kept on coming.

For the first time in almost a century, when Arthur Conan Doyle was buried in a Turkish carpet in his garden, my hometown of Crowborough is in the news.  For those fortunate never to have been, Crowborough is a small place in the Weald of about 20,000 souls. The cadet training camp, where my school pals and I endured a week of army exercises and tinned rations, has been turned into a migrant hostel for more than 500 asylum seekers, sparking a furious reaction from the local residents. I have much sympathy with them – but also for the young men who have been sent to live there.  Kim Bailey, leader of the protest group Crowborough Shield, calls the decision to house migrants in the town ‘disgusting’ and a ‘disgrace’. ‘There is nothing to do in Crowborough,’ she adds.

British pubs are having a moment. Not in Britain: you can blame Keir Starmer’s rise in business rates for that. Instead, they are branching out overseas. Take Wetherspoons, the granddaddy of British boozers, set to open next month in Alicante airport, or BrewDog, which has opened its doors in Dubai and many other international outposts besides.  Perhaps British pub chains will prove to be our next big export market. No doubt there will be the obvious jokes about arch-Brexiteer Tim Martin opening pubs in Europe. But would you really bet against him? Whatever you think of Wetherspoons, I can assure you that you’ll never find an empty one. Just imagine the kind of trade they could do in Barcelona or Rome. Which brings me to Dubai. Did you know there was a BrewDog in Dubai?

Half a century ago today, the Duke of Kent, Anthony Hopkins and 97 other diners had a meal of caviar and lobster canapés followed by grilled steak, all washed down with Dom Perignon. There was nothing too unusual about this slightly ostentatious menu, one that was a typical example of 1970s British fine dining. But it was a lunch that cost more than £1 billion to serve up. It was the first meal on board the very first scheduled flight on Concorde – the plane that, for close to three decades, made it possible to have breakfast in Belgravia, a meeting in Manhattan and still be home for supper in Soho.  That’s not a schedule that appeals to me (there’s nowhere decent to eat of a morning in Belgravia).

One of the guilty pleasures of the patriotic British travel writer is encountering yet another country, city or island that we invaded, occupied, colonised or just menaced into submission with a couple of gunboats. For example, did you know we casually took out Uruguay back in the day? It’s true – we demolished the walls of Montevideo in 1807, during the Battle of the River Plate, as I discovered on my first visit there last year. I’ve had the same experience all over. The Maldives. Kefalonia. The Colombian coast (we were so punchy and piratical half the Colombian nobility decamped 200 km inland). Also, Menorca, the Faroes, Haiti, Iceland, Bolivia (our economic colonisation is the reason women in La Paz wear bowler hats).

If Greta Thunberg ever docked in Houston, it wouldn’t be for long. Freeways stretch to 26 lanes, flaring oil refineries light the night sky and sports stadiums are sealed against the humidity with year-round refrigeration. At an Astros baseball match, a poster bluntly reminds attendees ‘TODAY’S GAME IS MADE POSSIBLE THANKS TO NATURAL GAS & OIL’. Between quarters at a Texans NFL match, a handful of fans score Chevron gift cards – ‘You’re going home with extra gas money!’ The crowd roars. Welcome to oil country. When fossil fuels enter Britain’s national conversation these days, it’s behind abstractions of net zero.

Normally rail ticket prices are raised in line with the Retail Prices Index (RPI) plus 3 per cent. This January, unusually, they didn’t increase. But that is not how it will feel if you fancy a short break in Edinburgh. In that case, you may well find yourself paying double what you used to pay. Say, on the spur of the moment, you fancy a short trip to the Scottish capital from London this weekend, but you are not quite sure which train you can leave on and when you want to come back. In the past, you could have bought a Supersaver Return, which allowed you to take any off-peak train there and back.

Among all the perfidies of public transport in Britain (a nation that can build a £40 billion railway based on the premise that the outskirts of Acton counts as a ‘central London’ terminus), perhaps the most ludicrous of all is this. On 26 December, a day when millions of us need to move about, no trains run. HS2 makes me angry. But I’ve spent every festive period of my adult life feeling positively dyspeptic about the meek acceptance with which we tolerate the almost complete lack of trains departing or arriving at any UK railway stations on Boxing Day. We are an absolute, solitary outlier in this regard. Even in Italy, where Christmas stretches lazily from Christmas Eve until Epiphany, there’s a skeleton timetable on 26 December.

Every time I hear about someone winning ten million pounds/euros/dollars in a lottery, I think (and I’m sure I’m not alone in this): ‘Yeah, but… wouldn’t it have been better if ten people had won one million?’ Well, that’s more or less what happens in Spain. Tomorrow nearly 2,000 people will share the first prize in the Christmas lottery, each winning €400,000 (£350,000). The same number stand to share the second (€125,000 each) and third (€50,000 each) prizes. So in total almost 6,000 Spanish households will suddenly be looking forward to a much better life. No wonder there are such explosions of joy the length and breadth of Spain every year on 22 December.

If OPM had released an antithetical response to their 2000 magnum opus ‘Heaven Is a Halfpipe’, I’m certain it would have been called ‘Hell Is a British Service Station’. Had this song been made, I think it would have gone a little something like this: ‘If I die before I wake / I’ll spend eternity in a Welcome Break / ’Cause right now on earth, I can’t do jack / I’m at a service station and my tyre’s flat / Now hell would be a Roadchef / With a Costa bacon bap / And hell would be the toilets / After a curry at Watford Gap.’ Admittedly, the lyrics could do with some workshopping, but you get the point.

There’s a trading estate, which might possibly need an envoy. There’s a Pizza Express, whose user ratings online are the equal to the Woking branch. And there’s also a branch of Boots which has a solid range of deodorants. Should Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor ever acknowledge any perspiration issues, desire a pepperoni or feel like taking on a part-time job, he’s moving to a most suitable neighbourhood. At only around seven miles from Sandringham, King’s Lynn will be Andrew’s nearest town when he takes up residence in his new home.

With the average cost of a hotel room in London costing around £250 a night – and not showing any signs of getting lower, either – most might think that a stay in the capital is a rarefied activity. However, the news that the Zedwell group of budget-conscious hotels have opened a mega-budget establishment in Piccadilly, the Zedwell Capsule Hotel, promises to be a game-changer. Hooray for anyone who wants an evening out in London and can’t face either the last train back or spending a week’s salary on a hotel. The idea behind the Zedwell Capsule Hotel is that it maximises space while promising not to skimp on the basics.

Westminster is filled not just with politicians, journalists and unemployed protestors, but with tourists. The data would suggest they are mainly Americans, French and Italians who come to see the monuments of central London, visit friends and family, and see how we’re faring after Brexit. They’re probably pretty worried when they see Westminster Bridge.   The amount of foot traffic on the bridge can be overwhelming; sometimes it’s impossible to cross it uninterrupted. People block your path and get in the way of each other, distracted by their phones. They wander blindly into the bike lanes, trying to carry out impromptu Instagram photoshoots, while aiming for the best angle of the famous clock tower.

There’s a saying – the kind seen on ‘inspirational’ posters on the walls of HR departments – that claims: ‘It’s about the journey, not the destination.’ Clearly it was dreamed up by someone who has never flown from Stansted and found themselves jostling through crowds of stag and hen parties, newly arrived Polish workers (there’s even been an Essex-based Polish taxi service to pick them up) and the hordes descending on Burger King as soon as they come through arrivals like John Mills and co. supping their first lagers after trekking through the desert in Ice Cold In Alex. It’s not just Stansted, of course. Gatwick – or ‘Chavwick’, as I’ve heard it called – is just as bad.

I was sitting in a hotel restaurant in Cheshire a while back: one of those rambling country manors, full of mock Jacobean wood panelling and fake Tiffany lamps, beloved of football-and-property enriched couples with gravy hued fake tans, sports cars parked outside and more signet rings than GCSEs. I was hungry and alone, aside from, as always, travelling with my own disability in the form of severe visual impairment, aka ocular albinism and nystagmus – or the Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow of very bad eyesight, as I prefer to call it. I’d asked in advance for an accessible room which, predictably, was ‘not yet ready’ for me to check into when I arrived.

Nearly everywhere you go in Nymburk, a small Bohemian town an hour or so from Prague, there are reminders of its most famous son, the novelist Bohumil Hrabal. The Czech writer, who died nearly 30 years ago, grew up here, amid the coopers and maltsters at the local Postřižinské brewery, where his stepfather was manager. Beer accompanied Hrabal throughout his life – much of his adulthood was spent sinking mug after mug at the Prague tavern U Zlatého tygra (‘At the Golden Tiger’). Terror stalked him too. He lived through Hitler’s occupation, grilled and harried by the Nazis who came very close to killing him.

Remember when history cost a few shillings? We wandered through romantic ruins, wondered who painted that dusty landscape above the fireplace, brushed lichen off carved stone and got shoes muddy spotting weeds in herbaceous borders. Visiting was about letting the quiet authority of age do its work; the place spoke for itself. After a financially bruising encounter with a sequence of heritage attractions in the past month, I’ve realised this experience is no longer available in Britain. Accessing our history today means a digital entrance gate, a logo, a QR code and a moral message – plus a fee that makes your eyes water. At St Paul’s Cathedral, the entry price for an adult is £26. A couple fork out £52 even before the gift shop. It cost £9 in 2007.

I have arrived in Naples, Italy, after an arduous flight from a chaotic London Gatwick Airport. I’m settled in a glamorous top-floor apartment in the Quartieri Spagnoli – the romantic old ‘Spanish Quarter’ – where Vespas fizz over cobbles and laundry hangs across alleys like flags of endless surrender. Most importantly, I’m clutching my Apple AirPods 3 in their shiny new capsule. Because I’ve come here to do a grand, futuristic experiment using their much-heralded ‘live translate’ function. Does it really work as smoothly as Apple says? Can I actually slot them in my ears and have them translate the Italian speaker in front of me, in real time? Is it really like the sci-fi Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?