Holidays

Pippa goes public Church of England lawyers ruled that the public must be allowed to attend the wedding of Pippa Middleton at St Mark’s Church, Englefield, Berkshire on 20 May. Other rulings that could put the dampers on your celebrity wedding: — Marriages are public services. All parishioners, and possibly all members of the public, must be let in ‘unless a genuine question of safety or security arises’. — It is not legally clear whether marriage services can be ticketed, but if they are then they must be publicised. — No video can be produced without the consent of the organist. Time off Jeremy Corbyn wants another four public holidays. Which countries have the most?

Advocates of New Zealand often boast that the country is like Britain was in the 1950s. This is all well and good if 1950s Britain is where you want to go on holiday, but it’s not for everyone. In fact, some might argue the main purpose of the past half-century has been to make Britain less like Britain was in the 1950s. What, then, are the options for those who would rather go on holiday to the Italian Riviera of the 1950s? The answer, it turns out, is Croatia, which has pleasant weather late into the autumn, idyllic coastlines and a laidback glamour that seems like a distant memory on the French coast, with its terror worries and burkini bans.

‘Farm cottage available, Dorset. Long or short let. £5 per week.’ I was looking for a writing bolthole, so I rang. ‘Bit off the beaten track but it’s quiet all right,’ said the owner. It was also unfurnished. ‘We can get some basics together for you.’ So, in the summer of 1968, I drove down to Dorset and my first holiday cottage. It was backed by a large wood, surrounded by fields of dairy cows and meadows of wild flowers, bordered by elms. Remember elms? God’s finest trees. They whispered in the wind. Furniture. A deal table and chair. Cooker. Enough crockery, cutlery and utensils for one. An armchair, old and comfortable. A bed, old and uncomfortable. A small table with a mirror. Pegs for hanging clothes.

There are few more beautiful places in this world than Bhutan in the eastern Himalayas. I know this because, right now, I am staring down the sub-tropical Punakha valley, gazing at an untouched rural landscape where singing women hoe the sunlit chilli fields. It’s glorious. And gloriously devoid of tourists. Though apparently Prince William and Kate are coming here in the next couple of weeks. I hope they don’t lower the tone. This unusual absence of tourists is down to a government policy.

Area of doubt Hillary Clinton has said that if she is elected she will open files on the US military facility in Nevada known as Area 51. Some rumours which will almost certainly not be confirmed: — According to a physicist who claims to have worked there, nine captured alien spacecraft have been examined there. Another says that a small band of aliens works there. They are 5ft high, wear dungarees and came from a planet called Quintumnia, 45 years’ travel time away. — Scientists there are working on a 6,000mph plane called Aurora, a prototype of which has already been flown. — Workers are suing the USAF after their skin turned red and peeled off.

We teased our friends by saying that our holiday would be on a far-away island. The Maldives, perhaps? No, Anglesey, off the northwestern tip of Wales. Mentally far-away, that is: but by train, it is only three and a half hours to Bangor, where we hired a car. Two mighty 19th-century bridges span the Menai Straits, with the fearsome currents known as the Swellies (regarded by Nelson as one of the greatest of all tests of seamanship). Cross them and the world seems to go into reverse. Time slows. You find yourself playing Scrabble. I never actually went to Anglesey when I was growing up but, once there, I slip into a world of idealised childhood — except that today groceries are delivered by Waitrose.

Gozo — Malta’s tiny island neighbour — was once rather a crucial spot in the Mediterranean. The Knights of Malta built a wall across Gozo’s Ramla Bay to stop Napoleon invading. The clever little Corsican attacked via the undefended gully next door instead. Homer’s island of Ogygia — ‘the navel of the sea’ in the Odyssey — is thought to be Gozo. It was in a love-cave above Ramla Bay that Odysseus caroused with the honey--voiced sea-nymph Calypso. Stranded on the beach, clinging to a plank from his shattered boat, he took refuge in her arms- — for seven years. He wasn’t that desperate to get home to his darling wife, Penelope, on Ithaca. I tracked down the love-cave — there was no seductive nymph to greet me.

I celebrated Eid in a sandy bay in Sri Lanka, watching from the warm, shallow sea as gaggles of local Muslims in holiday mood sauntered past to congregate at the public end of the beach about half a mile away. Since they looked so much more colourful, picturesque and exotic than the tourists in the security-guarded enclave where I was, I thought I’d wander down to take a few snaps. Having just finished Ramadan, they were all very excited — the young men especially. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, a group of dark-skinned boys with wispy beards, bare-chested but in long trousers, had surrounded me. ‘Selfie!’ one of them said — the new universal word. So we put our arms round one another’s shoulders and smiled for the phone cameras.

At the weekend, I tried — and failed — to get some money out of an empty cashpoint near Omonia Square. The Eurobank cashpoint was covered in fresh anti-German graffiti: ‘No to the new German fascism,’ it read in Greek, ‘No to the “dosilogous”.’ That’s the Greek for Nazi collaborators in the war. For any cashpoint users who couldn’t speak Greek, the graffiti artist helpfully added, in English, GERMANY= 卐. If the new, German-led EU austerity package goes ahead, the swastikas will keep spreading through Athens. I felt sorry for a German family eating ice cream in the deserted Estia café in Plaka. The couple, with four strapping children and granny in tow, looked the picture of six-foot-tall, blond, Teutonic health.

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 come here, Antwerp seems more estranged from Belgium.

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 Cataract. My guide, Alaa, explained that the word denotes a white water rapid on this stretch of the river: the medical sort sends the eye the same colour, hence the derivation.

Horror films occasionally use the device of the deceptive idyll. An apparently restful place — a clearing in the woods, a pretty cottage — is the site of a fiendish atrocity. A goodie escapes and breathlessly reports the matter to the police. Next morning the authorities race to the scene, and find nothing. Wickedness has been concealed. The deceptive idyll has returned. Such a place is Chambéry airport in south-east France. Framed by mountains and fringed by Lake Bourget, it was founded in 1938 and has not grown much. On weekdays little disturbs the airfield daisies save the tinkle of distant cow bells and a cooling Savoyard breeze. You can imagine the Milka girl dating the guy with the ping-pong bats. Yet on winter Saturdays, Chambéry’s mask drops.