Spectator Life

The moral absolutist in me believes that in every city, with its finite number of restaurants, there is such a thing as the best of all possible lunches. I don’t have to find it, but I have to get close. Mediocre doesn’t cut it. In fact, on holiday, the idea of wasting a meal on mere ‘mediocre’ fills me with crippling guilt over wasting not just money but time. What if I die before I see Paris again? I would be ashamed that I had wasted my precious mortality eating that Pret tuna niçoise salad. Laurie Lee described Spain as a place of ‘distinct appetites...

There cannot be a lazier way of travelling across Canada than in the Rocky Mountaineer. There are luxury trains, and then there’s this. For two days, I sat in a sumptuously upholstered, air-conditioned carriage, looking out at the vast wilderness of Canada’s interior, as waiters plied me with wine, chocolates and three-course meals. When imagining my trip across the Canadian Rockies, I had envisaged plenty of bracing walks and fresh air. But by the end of my journey, I had gained five-and-a-half pounds. I went on a walk around the frozen lake accompanied by a guide who warned us about a bear known as the Boss who weighs 497lbs Admittedly, I was in GoldLeaf, the most luxurious section of this glass-domed, double-decker train.

Naples is dirty, noisy, haphazard, and full of kamikaze scooter drivers. It is also sensual, liberating, and jolly. But that doesn’t seem to appeal to many people today, who prefer everything to be ordered, measured; all uncertainty removed. In city form, it’s known as Singapore: unlike Naples, everything there is clean, tidy, and works. It’s also a sterile, soulless, mini dictatorship. Everyone looks a little sticky, ruffled; no one cares about a sweat patch breaking out – shock horror J.G. Farrell’s wonderful book The Singapore Grip describes the fall of Singapore during the second world war. There are many parallels between the city back then and Naples now: the elegant decay and human vitality.

Europe is revolting against the tourist invasion. This summer, Venice has started charging a tourist tax to keep visitors at bay. Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera have just set up inter-island protests under the slogan, ‘Let’s change course – let’s set limits to tourism’. Barcelona is planning to ban Airbnb. In the Cinque Terre, on the Italian Riviera, some of the coastline is now one-way, to restrict tourist traffic. On another bit of the Ligurian coast, plans are afoot to charge walkers. You can see why – the famous cities and resorts of Europe have become one vast Queueworld, where tourists gather in great numbers, intense heat – and, increasingly, intense misery.

I am sitting in a little bar overlooking the jaunty marina of Trinité-sur-Mer, on the opulent south-east coast of Brittany. My Kir Breton is cold, fizzy, sweet and rubescent. Everyone around me is swigging Sancerre and cidre as the sun slowly nods below the green, southerly Celtic hills. The water glitters, the pretty people parade, the douceur de vivre is palpable. If you look at what has happened to Paris and Marseille, you can see how this can easily go wrong, how France’s good fortune can be squandered I've been here in Brittany five days, having got the ferry over from Portsmouth. And, quite frankly, the difference in life quality has been stark.

I belong to a generation of foreign correspondents whose first move, on entering a hotel room, was not to turn down the bed or to check (hopefully) for hot water, but to examine the phone, screwdriver in hand. Could you detach it from its socket? Could you open it up to get at the wiring? Did you have a compatible adaptor, and even if you did, could the line transmit data back to your editor in London? The rooms had recently been redone, according to the owner’s redesign, and this entailed removing the tables There were more than a few times when I whisked my long-suffering husband out of an otherwise more than acceptable hotel back on to the rain-drenched road in pursuit of communications.

Gawping at the famous sights of the Cotswolds has been a popular pastime for centuries. So too is writing about the huge numbers of people gawping at the famous sights of the Cotswolds. The Times, Telegraph, Express and the BBC have all covered the explosion of mass-tourism since the pandemic, which is driven mainly by social media algorithms bombarding the globe with irresistible Cotswolds images. You can now tour the Cotswolds to gawp at the sight of thousands of other people gawping, or buy a paper and gawp at a professional gawper gawping at gawpers.

Everyone knows that Italy is a boot. Many people know that the boot has a heel – the rocky, sunburnt region of Puglia. Perhaps a few know that the heel has a spur – the Gargano Peninsula. Yet virtually no one knows that the Gargano hides a magical woodland – the Foresta Umbra – a national park and treasure. And one of a dozen or more Italian parklands that are practically unvisited by foreign tourists.

You really have to force yourself to love flying. Sitting on the tarmac for an hour and a half with an air conditioning unit that won’t turn off and two babies locked in a battle of who can scream the loudest is not in my ‘Top 10 Days Well Spent For Zak’. But the plane is an experience. Though commercial air travel has been a possibility since 1914 – some argue earlier in the case of airships – we still go through that shudder of glee (or fright) when the plane does the impossible and leaves the ground. For all of the pitfalls of flying, the miracle of air travel means there’s always something endearing about planes. The world doesn’t make sense here. Drinking a pint of lager with a Nando’s at 3.50 a.m. is perfectly normal This does not apply to airports.

‘Melt your heart,’ said Simone, the Kiwi sleep therapist, stretching her generous body as elegantly as she was able on the yoga mat. Waves lapped the beach nearby. ‘Glow it violet, then allow the violet to flow up, up, up into your chest, your belly, now your legs and arms…’ Well, I tried, honestly I tried, but my heart stubbornly refused to melt, or even, for that matter, to glow. As sturdy English hearts of oak appeared to be melting all around me, I felt I was rather letting the side down. And as for the violet? Nada. The beginning and end of this ju-ju ordeal was bracketed by bells tinkled around our heads like some vaguely asiatic-version of a Catholic mass Faith is at the heart of the health business, but why does no-one call out the Emperor for his déshabillage?

Like a lot of people who didn’t know him, I felt sad hearing of the death of Michael Mosley on the Greek island of Symi, being familiar with him as a doctor whose pleasant voice I often heard on the radio. He had the gift of giving advice without being patronising or preachy. Mosley seemed to be a wise man – and for this reason, the way he died seemed all the more shocking. I found it particularly poignant that his body was found just 30 meters from the perimeter fence of a beach resort. Somewhat sheepishly, I immediately identified with the inhabitants of the beachfront compound; if I’d have been on that island, that’s where I’d have been, flat out by the swimming pool, cocktail to hand and no trek more adventurous planned than that between beach and bar.

You approach the pier at Clacton-on-Sea by passing under an elegant bridge, one which in Venice you would probably stop to admire. But this is Essex and the stonework is emblazoned with the town’s coat of arms and motto, Lux, salubritas et felicitas – light, health and happiness. Here you can admire the turning blades of the 172-megawatt Gunfleet wind turbine array or the grey masses of distant container ships Those familiar with this East Coast town will know that these qualities are in pretty short supply here – the constituency in which Nigel Farage hopes to be elected the next MP. Indeed, if George Orwell were chronicling Britain’s social failures today, this would be just the place to come.

On reading that the Maldives are to ban Israeli passport holders from entry as an alleged protest over the war in Gaza, I hooted with laughter. That dump – I wouldn’t go there if you paid me, – which is exactly what happened in 1995, when the Sunday Times sent me abroad for the very first time. I was 35, and due to a combination of being very keen on London, where I lived, and not wanting to have extra sex with my first and second husbands (which I’d heard was probable when one went en vacances) I’d never missed visiting the rest of the world. If I wanted to swim, I’d go to Brockwell Lido; if I wanted to sunbathe, I’d go and play sardines in Soho Square. But in the honeymoon stage of my relationship with my new young mistress, I was keen to show her a good time.

I’ve always loved Porto and need little excuse to visit. Not uncoincidentally, I’ve always loved port and need little excuse to drink it and so, invited to stay in this fine city and road-test its latest attraction, the ambitiously-monikered World of Wine, who was I to resist? There’s been a mixed reception to Wow locally. One person told me that it was garish and vulgar Porto is really two cities, Porto itself and Vila Nova de Gaia, separated by the mighty Douro River, along the banks of which lie the precipitous vineyards responsible for the finest of all fortified wines and some increasingly tasty red and white wines too. I was billeted in the swanky Yeatman Hotel.

All my life I’ve wanted to take a narrow boat holiday down one of Britain’s canals but have never got round to it. There’s always been something easier and more pressing, perhaps even a touch more glamorous than a week spent floating around Britain – a trip to Andalusia, a city break, a train-ride round Siberia – but this year, in my mid-fifties, I’m finally making it happen. With my cousin and both our young daughters as crew members, I’ve shelled out on the rental of a four-berth narrow boat – painted a resplendent red and racing green, a bit like a Hornby train.

I am Cornish. Indeed I am so Cornish my sister lives about three miles from where my echt Cornish ancestors lived in the 13th century (near Falmouth), and my mum makes working-class Cornish recipes so obscurely Cornish most of the Cornish have barely heard of them (‘date and lemon pie’). As such, I am pretty fond of the place, and I like to go back as much as I can. Except in summer, when it’s crowded. And increasingly May. Or September. Or October. Or the rest of autumn. And Christmas, And Easter. And New Year. And any weekend at any time, ever.

I travel to the African bush frequently, at least once a year. It takes my mind of British politics. The trips often involves watching predators hunting down their prey and then tearing the poor animals limb from limb. Red in tooth and claw, the African bushveld reminds me of the fragility and brevity of life and the ever-presence of death. My insignificant place on the planet was thus confirmed A week ago I was in the Botswana’s Okavango Delta, at the safari operator Natural Selection’s new North Island camp, when I suddenly found myself confronting my own mortality. I had gone to bed early after a pleasant meal in the camp’s mess with several fellow guests, including two eminent Americans, a wealthy New York investment banker and a prominent Miami medical professor.

Cowboy boots are ubiquitous in Nashville – although not hats. ‘That’s Texas,’ one woman told us earnestly. Locals say, ‘y’all,’ ‘yes, ma’am,’ and make eye contact when they speak to you. Despite the lack of cowboy hats, this is still the South. Welcome to Music City, the capital of country and the gleaming buckle of the Bible Belt. Nashville is home to over 700 churches and numerous evangelical choirs. The Union Gospel Tabernacle, built in the 1890s by a Tennessee businessman, was once the largest church in the city. Now its simply the Ryman Auditorium. After the first world war, the owners found they made more cash booking secular performers.

To nearly any English tourist, the small southern Italian town I’m currently living in, half an hour from my daughter’s school, would seem idyllic. It has an old castle, a monastery and olive groves in all directions, but in Puglian guidebooks it barely rates a mention. It’s the scruffy, down-to-earth cousin of richer or bigger towns nearby, places like Monopoli or Bari, but has nearly everything I could want. There are arches and stone stairways, pot-plants everywhere (80 in my alleyway alone), and that delicious, ivory-coloured stone which paves the streets in Puglia and which long use has polished to a shine. At night the street-lanterns turn the white buildings orange, and the sky above is inky blue with stars.

Some time in the Noughties I sat next to a guy at work who told me he’d just had a holiday in a village on the outskirts of Amalfi. The village was called Atrani – quite unknown then, but now swooned over as the setting for the ominous but dreamy black-and-white Netflix adaptation Ripley. That year, I had no plans for the summer and decided to replicate his trip, with my two daughters, aged 13 and 10. There was no hotel in the village, rather a series of rooms rented out by a lawyer called Filippo. I contacted him to book and he replied: ‘I’m sure it will be fine, just turn up.’ This didn’t over-fill me with confidence but I went ahead. We flew into in Naples late one evening and got to the hotel I’d found in the Rough Guide.

As George Orwell astutely observed, England is a nation of hobbyists – and their sometimes eccentric private pursuits are one of the reasons that this country did not follow the rest of Europe into totalitarian dictatorship during the 20th century. A people bent on taking a fishing rod to stream or canal every weekend, or hanging around railway platforms to note the numbers of passing trains, or laboriously sticking stamps into albums, are unlikely to have the time or temptation to fall for political extremes. The English devoted their leisure time to hobbies, though it should also be noted that such peaceable pastimes are mostly the preserve of men.

Tokyo, Japan ‘Shhh! Now on face to respectable great eels life’. How’s that for the first line of an article? I spotted this gem written on a sign in the window of a seafood restaurant in the Hibiya Midtown shopping centre in Tokyo recently. I was delighted. I’ve spent 25 years in Japan and have always enjoyed a good bit of mangled Japanese English. I had been dismayed of late by an apparent improvement in the quality of English on signs and noticeboards around Tokyo. But this was the old stuff. This was ‘Engrish’. Why would a people usually so meticulous about every aspect of life be so seemingly careless about the correct use of a foreign language?

No-one seems to like tourists any more. This week Venice introduced its €5 entry charge – which merely buys you the right to go into the city and be ripped off by cafes and restaurants. On Tenerife, residents have been marching and daubing slogans on the walls ‘tourist – go home’. So much for free movement. Meanwhile, in Japan, a village near Mount Fuji is so fed up with Instagrammers that it is erecting a giant screen to hide the mountain. Happy holidays! It was a trudge over ash and glacial gravels – which make for surprisingly easy walking Not to worry. If you want to go somewhere where you won’t bother the locals you could always do as I did last summer and walk across Iceland. That is a 200 mile trek without a single local to offend.

To understand Sadiq Khan’s tenure as Mayor of London, you need only ride one of his buses. Eight years of repeating that he is the ‘proud son of a bus driver’ have not yielded a single improvement to the experience of travelling by the famous red bus. In fact, many things are worse.  she suggested I couldn’t have lived in London for very long and then burst into tears Tap your card and find your way to one of few seats unsullied by chicken bones, unfinished soft drinks and disposed of vapes. Sit down and endure the tinny sounds your fellow passengers deem acceptable to broadcast from their handheld portals to hell. Request that they use headphones and risk being stabbed. Even if you can avoid all this, you can’t escape being infantilised by the recorded announcements.

California was once home to a certain vision of the American dream; Mamas & the Papas records, grinning surfers, chrome bumpers. Now LA and San Francisco are full of glass and steel and petty criminals. Escape their sketchy downtowns and you’ll find huge copy-and-paste estates of identical homes. Urban sprawl has choked off California’s charm in everywhere but Palm Springs, a desert valley city to the east of Los Angeles.  Kirk Douglas lived here, alongside Rock Hudson, Janet Gaynor and Frank Sinatra. Elvis and Priscilla Presley honeymooned in the city for the whole of 1967. Producers would often oblige their stars to remain within a two-hours drive of their LA studios. Meanwhile, paparazzi were only reimbursed for travel within 100 miles of LA.