Sophia Martelli

While ocean liners are hardly butterflies, they have a habit of flitting carelessly between countries, often visiting several within a week. A river cruise, however, takes its (relatively few) passengers to the heart of a country, the aim being to seduce with dramatic, ever-changing vistas and evocative insights — cruises for the connoisseur, if you will. Because of its many different micro-cultures and magnificent backdrops, Europe is where river cruises thrive.

GCSEs have already begun to change, and the A-level revolution comes next year. Sophia Martelli considers who benefits from the new rules – and who doesn’t A year from now, the new A-level curriculum will hit sixth-form classrooms; changes to GSCE have already been partly implemented. The exam reforms initiated by Michael Gove are hailed either as ‘much-needed’ or ‘carnage’ depending on who you talk to. Although controversial, most teaching professionals agree that a good sort out of exams is overdue, including Paul Redhead, a former head teacher who now works with the Council for Independent Education. Public exams have been ‘systematically devalued since the 1980s’, according to Dominic Cummings, Gove’s former special adviser.

Of course one feels free on a holiday: that’s what holidays are for. But I have rarely felt freer than when my younger brother, two wild Irish cousins and I, all aged 16 or under, drove across Éire to the south-west tip (with, I should mention, the permission and indeed encouragement of our respective parents). Setting off from Wexford in an ancient, definitely unroadworthy VW Beetle in the days before these vehicles had any classic cachet, with not even a provisional driving licence between us, it was a miracle that we arrived in Baltimore a day later — albeit decorated in mud and twigs after kipping the night in a ditch outside Cork where the Garda had passed their torches over us and grunted, leaving us to be the gypsies we so evidently were.

The boom and bust have left their mark on Dublin. Cruising through the outskirts past the (industrial) estate of Sandyford — flimsy-looking buildings, each as nastily designed as the last but in wildly different styles — I double-take at a gigantic half-built multi-storey car park. There are ‘To Let’ signs everywhere and it’s all a bit reminiscent of a Joni Mitchell song. But the shiny new Luas tram which links this monument to property development greed to the centre of the city is quiet, efficient and fast — and Dublin is, thank heavens, still the ‘fair city’ of the song, the Liffey meandering unruffled and majestic through the middle of it.

Arriving at Marseilles’s Gare St Charles in the early hours of a balmy October night, the first marvel of the city that is pointed out to me — both proudly and affectionately — is a large, well-fed rat that pours itself into a nook in the stone wall of the station. ‘Welcome to Marseilles,’ says Oliver, my laconic host, pushing his bicycle along the street to avoid running into a trio of high-cheekboned Maghrebian hip-hop devotees. As they saunter past, deltoids rippling, bouncing fluidly and elegantly on their toes to some innate city beat, Oliver adds, ‘Also known as North North Africa.’ With a population of 850,000 (1.6 million within the greater city limits), Marseilles is France’s second largest city, dwarfed only by Paris.