Mark Palmer

There’s a company I came across the other day called Value Added Travel. And despite the horrible name, it seems to be doing good business — which got me thinking. If I were starting a travel business I’d be tempted to name it something along the lines of Guaranteed To Make You Feel Better About Life — a mouthful, I grant you, and a little twee, but doesn’t it describe the reason we go places? Even the great Patrick Leigh Fermor’s epic walk from the Hook of Holland to the Golden Horn was underpinned by an innate sense of optimism. In a word, hope. Which is why I have no wish to revisit Vegas and little desire ever to drink beer on the strip in Magaluf. But give me a regular dose of Luang Prabang and I promise to help old ladies across the street for ever more.

Frankly, I wasn’t a great success at school — although I like to think it was more a case of peaking at prep school, where I was captain of football, a prefect and even managed to pass Common Entrance, thank you very much. And then it all went downhill. No excuses (plenty actually), but one reason for failing to dazzle at Eton was because my classical tutor cast such a long, dark shadow over me that by the age of 16 all my energies went into disliking him as much as he clearly disliked me. His name was Fred How and he was a bachelor so set in his creaking ways that even the swots and goodie-goodies struggled to find anything pleasant to say about him.

World Cup fever has arrived. Every morning on the way to work, more little plastic flags of St George flutter from white vans or, in my case, from the window of our trusty Audi A6. Many of my fellow countrymen regard this footie orgy as wholly unnecessary — not me. Bunting will go up at the front of our house if we advance to the quarters, whereupon my wife will spend most evenings in a curry house with a girlfriend, leaving me to invite the lads round for random games such as Honduras v. Ecuador. Result. More than anything, the tournament offers a chance to wheel out my one Roy Hodgson (he’s the England manager) anecdote. It was back in 1994 when he was coach of Switzerland and about to take his team to the World Cup in America, for which England did not qualify.

My mother always said she wanted to ‘die tidy’. But I never imagined she would file everything away quite so neatly as she did. One drawer in her desk was given over to travel. It included a little Hermès box containing a leather docket given to her by Hotel-Du-Cap-Eden-Roc in Cap d’Antibes after she and my father spent their honeymoon there in 1950. It was a passport to the hotel, allowing them to go as day guests whenever they wanted for the rest of their lives. Which is pretty much what they did. They would spend two weeks every year in a B&B in St Jean Cap Ferrat and enjoy at least one day at Eden Roc (built in 1870 by the founder of Le Figaro newspaper), lounging by the pool with Cannes shimmering in the distance.

A few weeks ago, I accompanied my daughter to an Open Day at Roehampton College, where she is hoping to start a teacher training course in September. I enjoyed it — and was impressed by the broad mix of motivated young men and women who, if all goes well, will soon be teaching the next generation of primary school children. Towards the end of the afternoon, the co-ordinator said she wanted to offer a few tips about the interview process that would begin once all the applications have been submitted. It turned out she had only one main tip: avoid upspeak. She stressed the point vigorously.

Some years ago (well, nearly ten if you must know), I gave a dinner to mark my undistinguished half-century. Nothing grand — but a convivial gathering of ten men and ten women in the basement of a restaurant where several of us used to hang out in loon pants in the early 1970s. Looking down the table, I realised that five out of the ten men had been at preparatory school with me. This was a good feeling but not one that struck me as unusual. I loved Sunningdale — although when I think about those freezing lavatories, those sagging beds, those terrifyingly stern rebukes from Pauline the matron, those Search the Scriptures lessons that introduced us to the trials of eternity, there were plenty of reasons to hate the place.

‘Where do you stand on Syria?’ asked my stepson. Tricky one. Clearly, the Assad regime is loathsome and the West should exert more pressure to end the bloodbath, but on the other hand I’m not convinced we should be doing anything at all to help the divided rebels, not least because the faction that takes over will have lots of scary chemical weapons at its disposal. My steppy’s eyes glazed over. I didn’t have a view at all. That’s what he was thinking as he reverted to his iPhone for a far more stimulating exchange than anything I was offering. How wrong he was. My position is as clear and undiluted as the vodka in my tumbler before the intrusion of tonic. I don’t know. What about global warming? Again, not easy.

It’s only 150 years since a toff was roasted in the remote Dordogne village of Hautefaye. The poor soul was a French aristocrat resented by the locals. Perhaps he was an outsider. Perhaps he was a second-homer taking advantage of the delights of the Dordogne without ever turning up to any 19th-century equivalents of today’s wine and cheese festivals, arts exhibitions and boules tournaments. Silly fellow. Outsiders in 2013 — well, the Brits, anyway — are proper joiner-inners and the French are perfectly happy to have them around. But my goodness there are a lot of them.

My 22-year-old daughter is feeling a little low. Me, too, actually. I’ve just told her there aren’t enough pennies in the coffers to go skiing this season — just as there weren’t last season. I suggested she should get together a group of friends and do it on the cheap but we all know that doing skiing on the cheap means pretending you’re flying down the mountain while parked in your local Costa with a hot -chocolate. ‘We’ll go next year,’ I said. And we will. In fact, I’ve already been in touch with those nice people at -Powder White and I am about to sign up for a 12-berth chalet in Courchevel 1650 that has an open fire, a hot tub on the roof and the promise of freshly baked cake every evening when we get down from the mountain.

Everyone thinks travel writing is a doddle. You soak up the sun for a couple of weeks and when you get home the words pour forth, dazzling the reader with wish-I-was-there images. Then you sit back and wait for the cheque to drop through the letterbox while planning your next safari or walk in the rainforest or flop on an Indian ocean beach, encouraged by bubbly travel PRs who tell you that the ‘views are breathtaking’, the food ‘to die for’ and the whole experience ‘the stuff of dreams’. But there’s the problem. The vocabulary sucks. No form of writing is so riddled with clichés or lends itself so easily to the trite and outright banal as travel journalism. And forget a writer’s CV.

Every now and again you read about ‘Empty Nest Syndrome’ — a curious affliction suffered by parents who are sad that their children have left home. It sounds like heaven to me. My wife and I should be, well, free as a bird now that all our little ones have fled to university and beyond. Those arduous parent evenings, competitive end-of-term picnics and final warnings from the bursar are already a distant memory. We can come and go as we please, spending weekends learning to grow asparagus. Except that we can’t. Because of Nero. Nero is a parrot who lives with us and who will still be squawking a decade or so after I’ve joined the great grumpy chorus in the sky. We are chained once more.

We like our little cottage in a pretty Wiltshire village on the River Kennet — and we just hope the village likes us. It’s hard to tell. ‘I see you’ve been doing a lot of work on the house. So, have you finally moved in or are you [slight pause, crinkle of nose] weekending?’ asked one of the village’s grand dames. ‘Oh, yes, we’re very much here and loving it,’ I said. There was no need to mention that London is where we live, Wiltshire is where we flop, and that we don’t even get down every weekend. Don’t tell anyone, but we are guilty of fortnighting. Even so, we made the cut for drinks (6.30to 8.30 p.m.