Travel

It’s that time of year again. No sooner have you recovered from Christmas than the posh start talking about their skiing jaunts planned for the February half-term. But let’s use the term posh advisedly, because – make no mistake – skiing is now anything but. Where once flinging yourself down the Cresta Run may have been a solid-gold toff signifier or ‘the Sloanest sport’, according to class anthropologist Peter York, now it simply means that you’re rich. No snow cannon pumping out snow on the low slopes can fool anyone. The fact that ski resorts are now melting before our eyes seems to be where this social morality tale ends. Skiing and British class have long been caught in a complicated embrace.

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.

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.

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.

A young woman recently approached me as I stood outside Trader Joe’s on the corner of 93rd Street and Columbus Avenue in Manhattan. “Excuse me,” she said, “I’m visiting from the UK and I’m just wondering if there’s anything worth seeing around here.” This is not an unusual occurrence. It’s always tourist season in New York. People come for the cherry blossoms in Central Park, for the magic of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and for the vague hope of running into Timothée Chalamet at a downtown brunch place. They even come in the sweltering heat of summer when I, personally, would rather be anywhere else – ideally somewhere without the pungent smell of hot garbage and misplaced ambition.

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.

If you’ve ever thought of visiting the crocodile-shaped island of Cuba, or run into someone recently returned from sultry nights in the country’s salsa halls, there’s a good chance you’ll have heard the phrase “See it before it changes.” And I don’t mean because of Hurricane Melissa. The idea is that the centrally planned communist state, one of the last on Earth, will soon morph into America and a balmy Brigadoon full of people unencumbered by money, modern cars or Alexa will evaporate. I think most people, if they knew what Cubans have endured, wouldn’t use that phrase, which is up there in its lack of tact with “they’re poor but they’re happy.

You saw Homicide: Life on the Street, right? You know, that gritty TV police drama set in Baltimore. What? Ah, no, you’re thinking of The Wire, that other gritty TV police drama set in Baltimore, the one with Idris Elba and Dominic West. Homicide predates The Wire and was filmed largely around Fells Point and along Baltimore’s historic waterfront. The former City Recreation Pier, which stood in for the police department, is now a swanky hotel, the Sagamore Pendry Baltimore, in whose comfortable embrace I have just wallowed. Baltimore doesn’t have a great reputation. Whenever I tell American friends I’ve been there they affect horror and ask what on earth I was thinking. Couldn’t I have gone to Boston, New Orleans, New York, Washington D.C.

Call me crazy, but I’ve always loved Belfast. Even when it was grim, scary and unlovable, I loved Belfast. It doubtless helped that when I came to know it, I was courting a local girl. I loved it because she loved it and, well, I loved it even after she chucked me. The people, the bars, the craic – gosh, the very air – invariably get under my skin. I’ve always felt at home in the city’s embrace. And now that Belfast is no longer grim, scary and unlovable – and long since my Colleen came to love another and long since I came to love another too – I love Belfast even more. The craic is just as hilarious as that in Cork, Dublin or Galway. And today it’s even more so thanks to a swank and a pride (and a peace) that was absent before.

It was stiflingly hot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I was exploring the eastern Galápagos Islands, living cheek-by-jowl on a former casino ship with a cast of characters plucked straight from a murder mystery novel: a former British supermodel, an Ecuadorian presidential candidate, the ex-drummer of a band who once supported the Who and an influencer couple who looked like they had stumbled off the set of Triangle of Sadness. The stars of the show – and boy did they know it –were the sea lions While the trip had all the ingredients to cook up an irresistible whodunit, I was not just there to inspect the wildlife on board but to observe the wildlife off it.

I’m standing at a bar in a car park on the rooftop of a shopping centre. I ask the bartender if the beer on draught is big or small. ‘That depends on your definition,’ he says. ‘What is big? What is small?’ The oonce-oonce of German trance music makes it hard to hear, and I’m distracted by the solitary figure on the dance floor wearing all black and contorting her body into the shape of a pretzel. ‘Is the beer groß or klein?’ I shout. The bartender – who is well over 50 and has the fashion sense of a Green Day groupie from 2005 – just smirks and says, ‘That’s for you to decide.’ I order the beer anyway. It is small (klein). I don’t tip. This is Berlin. Berlin is big.

There are many destinations which spring to mind when considering the options for a weekend away with a young family. There are beaches by the dozen, theme parks and glamping opportunities galore. But there is only one Florence. And I cannot say this strongly enough: when it comes to the kids, the Center Parcs of the Renaissance will not let you down. It begins with Tuscany itself, a place so beautiful that you can get Stendhal syndrome on the bus on the way from the airport. And even if your children are glued to their screens, eventually motion sickness will force them to look up and they may glimpse its dreamy vistas, too.