Culture

Edinburgh Fringe 2023: A long overdue return to the best festival on the planet

The last time I experienced the sensory overload that is Edinburgh Fringe was in 2017 and while a lot has changed since then, the arrival in the city is still heralded by an avalanche of flyers for shows. Without fail, these shows are always on in five minutes and are always guaranteed to be absolutely hilarious. It was reassuring to see the Fringe in full flow and to realise that the chaos remains intact.

I battled my way to The Edinburgh Larder first for food and had a delicious Scottish breakfast, swerving the haggis and black pudding, much to the disappointment of the friendly chap serving. At that moment, I felt very much like an English tourist, but the ingredients. Oh my god, the ingredients. After food, I headed to Calton Hill, which I’d never been to before, despite visiting Edinburgh at least six times. From the hill, there are views of the city from every direction, including the quite awful poo emoji building, walnut whip or whatever it is. Happily, the poo is not visible from all angles and there’s enough beauty in Edinburgh to spare. Just visible in the distance are the bridges across the firth of forth, Arthur’s seat and the Old Town. Put all of this together, and Edinburgh surely has the most enviable views of any city in the UK. The weather was not exactly glorious but it was a real change from what the forecasts had been predicting. Within minutes, fluffy clouds turned what the Scottish might call a braw day into a dreich one. I fled the hill, taking shelter in The Advocate pub and almost immediately, the sun returned. Welcome to Edinburgh!

I had missed the fringe a great deal in my time away and had spent quite some time in advance booking shows and trying to work out what would be unmissable – harder said than done when I arrived just a few days after the festival started. The idea of turning up with nothing booked and over 3000 shows to choose from is too scary for words. Our first show was Reuben Solo, but as we had some time to kill, we thought we would see JD Shapiro with a show called If it ain’t woke, don’t fix it. With an edgy title like this, it was sure to be an incredible hour. The staff at the venue informed us that he’d simply not bothered to turn up for his shows. Maybe his non-arrival was an elaborate show in itself and I was inadvertently part of an art project? Reuben Solo did show up and this was a fun hour of a loud and often chaotic Aussie performing a show that had little in the way of flow. His easy rapport with the audience and his stunning abilities with a graph papered over any cracks for a strong start to the festival.

Our second show was Tamsyn Kelly – Crying at TK Maxx. The show was more on the personal side and Tamsyn is a good storyteller and has a good ability to form stories into a cohesive set, but the delivery lacked confidence to make the material shine. Tamsyn laughed a lot at her own material, which always confuses me; after months of writing and performing, it probably wouldn’t be that funny. But she’s a likeable presence and early in her career. She has daddy issues, which gives her something in common with Simon Amstell who was at the fringe to work on new content. For £18! His lines, even ones not fully formed, are so sharp and polished, you realise just how good he is at comedy. He would tell us that he’s a star, can sleep with whoever he likes and is very important, but he’d then remember that he needs us more than we need him. He needs the validation from an adoring audience, while he’s on a journey of healing and growing. His transition from bubbly but acerbic host on Channel 4 to a man on stage telling us he loves ‘bobbing up and down on a dick’ has been a remarkable one. While his current themes, of family, sex and drugs are familiar, his delivery is so controlled and charming that he remains intensely watchable.

On our second morning we were offered free tickets to ‘a show about pirates’ that was starting soon so we went along. The venue was a minimal affair inside a hotel conference room with a box that said Sand! on it, thus flawlessly transporting us to a desert island. Two pirates come on stage and perform something akin to a poem with occasional funny moments. The writing and performances were good but the story shied away from the theme that pirates are pretty gay – this could have been developed further but what was there was charming. Most remarkable was the American accents at the end; I totally bought the Scottish accent from one performer and the other accent, a sort of strangled cockney, was nothing if not intriguing.

In the afternoon, we watched Christopher Bliss, a novelist who is so busy writing books that he has no time to read other people’s novels. He’s a fan of the 3-page novel of the sort that gives the twist away in the title, such as ‘Karen turns out to be the ghost’ and through the show he reads us his novels, and gives remarkable advice to budding authors. It’s all silly fun that never takes itself seriously.

Straight after Christopher Bliss was Tom Ballard, who I saw a few years back. He also doesn’t take himself seriously, opening with stories of him having sex with a male witch. Ballard takes great joy in being open and explicit and I suspect he might not be familiar with having a filter, which I am grateful for. Ballard muses on the Queen’s death, where it could be said he wasn’t a fan but he also takes aim at Rupert Murdoch and other billionaires, to great effect. He’s very loud and even when he asked if he was too loud, the audience all agreed he wasn’t too loud because Ballard is a force of nature. There’s also an angry edge to his work and his material on why capitalism is a disaster is both funny and thought provoking. A raucous standout at the fringe.

The absolute standout of the fringe though, was Patti Harrison. Her show is called My Huge Tits Huge Because They Are Infected Not Fake! and I am sure I booked tickets for this show based on the title and ridiculous poster alone. I am glad I did because this is a strange beast of a show. Patti comes on with her phone by her side, advising us that the show is a work in progress and that we aren’t to look at her huge tits as there is a perfectly good reason for them being huge. She leads us down different ideas and ramblings, promising that the show will begin at some point. Throughout the show, she continues to say she will begin soon, while being in the middle of a story about her experiences with a therapist before wildly veering off to an aside about how she hates the British accent, or her love affair with a Hollywood star. It’s such a tightly controlled show that you are never able to work out where Patti will go next. She breaks into songs at a few points and unusually for a comedy show, they are funny and stick in your head. This is comedy of the highest order and I loved the experience of laughing uncontrollably at various points while the audience member next to me remained stony faced. The end of the show brings together what themes Patti has touched upon in a crescendo of chaos and screaming. As often happens to me when I enjoy a show, I have now become obsessed with Patti and will be telling everyone that will listen – and those that won’t – that this is a show that needs to be seen.

A walk around EUR, Rome. A blend of glory and dread.

The historic core of Rome is ravishing, but as soon as I saw a photo of Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, I knew my trip wouldn’t be complete with a visit there. We travelled there by Rome’s metro system, which could be described in one word: rickety. So remarkably shoddy is the system, that on entering, I didn’t think the ticket machine would work as nothing looked in working order. Lights were out, windows were missing the essential glass contingent and the station was empty. Astonishingly, a moving piece of graffiti came towards us and on closer inspection, it was a metro train. I can honestly say I have never been on a public transportation system in such disrepair and it lived up to my expectations. I loved it.

The Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana a slice of Italian history, designed in 1938 for inclusion in the World Fair of 1942 and its entire purpose was to show off Italy and Fascism to the world. It was supposed to do this on the 20th anniversary of fascism in Italy, but clearly, things didn’t go to plan. The building was finally fully constructed in 1943, just in time to celebrate the fall of the fascist regime. The design of the building followed principles of fascist architecture, with a design that eschewed complex decoration but had echoes of the classic buildings of Rome. The Palazzo has been called the “Square Colosseum” due to the inspiration that building gave. For instance, the loggias of the Palazzo are similar to those of the Colosseum.

The exterior of the building looks like marble but the building was actually a concrete skeleton with a layer of travertine that gives it the appearance of being entirely made of stone. It’s an incredible achievement and the building looks astonishing from a distance and utterly transfixing from up close. Around the building are sculptures of horses, which seem to feature heavily in the world of fascism. But what I found most interesting were the 28 statues that represent different trades and industries of Italy. They perfectly complement the building, adding a touch of the ancient world to a building that feels like a perfect blend of the past and the future. I have since seen images of the building lit up at night and it looks perfect.

After walking around the building, alongside a tour group who all bought dogs with them (it was unclear why this was happening), we walked through some of the EUR district to see what else stood out. The Palazzo dei Congressi looks somewhat reminiscent of the Royal Festival Hall in London and was designed in 1938 to be ready for the World Fair, and remained incomplete until 1954. Another building that caught my eye was a mural that represented the history of Italy. Lots of triumphs, horses, death. That sort of thing. It’s enormous and in keeping with the glorified storytelling of the government.

After a long walk in the district, I couldn’t help but feel just a little bit of dread being around these buildings. Beautiful, yes. But are they comforting and warm? No? They feel, at times, cold and clinical. They are designed to make people feel small and insignificant. Perhaps in that feeling lies a small part of the problem of these sorts of governments. They just don’t feel like they’re for the people, more like the people exist to beautify the government.

The TWA Terminal at JFK

Our last stop in New York was the TWA terminal at JFK airport. Getting there was a testament to patience. At Rhinecliff station we arrived with plenty of time for our train only to find it was delayed, and delayed a bit more. Eventually, people at the station started muttering and working out what had happened. A handy Amtrak app showed the train was moving at 1mph and was 18 hours away, so we would be in for a wait. I foolishly assumed another train would come and rescue us but the entire line was buggered, so we got a taxi with a couple who were waiting at the station. They were very modern and suggested we Venmo them the cab fare. I still don’t know what a Venmo is. We took the cab to Poughkeepsie and got the “express” train to New York. It was described as the world’s slowest express train and that was true. It crawled through to Grand Central, sometimes going so slowly it felt like we might be moving backwards, but we got back to the city eventually.

Far later than planned, we got to our airport hotel and hot footed it to the TWA terminal, which I had become obsessed with. The terminal was built between 1959 and 1962, and had a Jetsons-era feel about it; a future full of grand curving lines and optimism for the future. The terminal’s roof was designed in the shape of a wing and corridors in the terminal were created as dramatic tubes. The terminal was dreamed up by Finnish architect Eero Saarinen with an economy that seems perfectly Scandinavian but also exciting enough to make flying from the terminal seem like an adventure in itself.

Everything about the design was entirely perfect, save for one vital detail. The expectation was that the terminal would be used by just over a million people a year, but within a year of the terminal opening, one and a half million people a year used it, turning the flowing space into a jumble. The age of the jumbo jet also made the terminal seem obsolete soon after opening and gradually the terminal became less important, by 2001 it was closed entirely.

Turning the terminal into something magnificent again appeared to be an impossible task; since it closed, the Port Authority asked organisations for proposals to bring the building back to life. Many ideas for hotels, conference centres and the like were suggested, but they kept falling through. Eventually, in 2014 a plan was presented and accepted, and today there’s a 500-room hotel, conference centre and renewed architectural gem in place. Everywhere inside the terminal are references to TWA. Naturally the hotel rooms have branding everywhere, and they don’t come cheap, with the frugal guest shelling out $261 plus the ubiquitous fees and taxes, coming to $364 a night. For this, you do get a room filled with midcentury furniture, the second most soundproof glass in the world, and as many international and national calls as you can do. To make this feel like a bargain, I’d spend the entire time on the blower, whether the recipient of the call liked it or not.

Arriving at the terminal is wonderful, and the elegance of the building shines through the dreck of a busy modern airport. A mixture of people are milling about but my favourite sight of the visit was to see two women in dressing gowns, plastered with the TWA logo, strolling around the terminal, clearly staying at the hotel. They sat near us in the Sunken Lounge bar, reclining in a chair, closing their eyes as if in a spa while surrounded by people using up some spare time before their flight. To their right, a bored kid on his phone. To their left, a family eating food from a plastic container. It immediately showed up the best and most jarring aspects of the TWA terminal. It’s open to the public so anyone can show up but it’s also wildly expensive. And where these two meet up – the whole thing becomes a bit confusing. I am delighted that everything is open to all, but it loses some of the style I was expecting when there. It’s the same on the gorgeous Connie jet, which is now a cocktail bar. The chic style of the jet age, the atmosphere of a Wetherspoons.

However, it’s an airport, and nobody goes to an airport for the vibes, and I will defend that belief as someone who wishes to spend the absolute minimum amount of time in an airport. I have endured many – far too many – exhausting runs in airports simply because I didn’t want to spend enough time in my personal vision of hell.

That being said, would I recommend the TWA terminal to a visitor to NYC? Yes. It’s a one of a kind marvel of travel architecture and I am so glad I got to experience it.

Woodstock

One of the reasons I was keen to go to Woodstock in October was for the leaf season, which I have read lots about and even checked out interactive maps of the best places to see the colours in New York state, most of which we’d missed by early November. In order to get to Woodstock, we needed to head to Penn Station, which is roughly the size of Europe and home to a thousand platforms. I loved seeing the names of where the trains were going. There are locations such as Elizabeth, Lancaster, but then names like Manasquan, Croton Harmon, Schenectady and Poughkeepsie which sound just exotic enough to warrant lots of exploring.

When we found our platform, I fell in love with how American the train looked. It was a sheet of aluminium with windows, or an Airstream caravan on rails. Much like the subway, it was brute and efficient. Whereas British trains are making attempts to look swish with the Azuma’s long nose looking a bit like a much slower bullet train, the Amtrak train just looked like a kid’s drawing of train. It was entirely charming as well as being comfortable.

As we sped up to the giddy heights of not fast, about 40 minutes out of Penn Station, I wasn’t really prepared for just how bright and luminescent the remaining leaves would be. Some were so bursting with colour it felt that people had painted them with a neon marker. It was astonishing and means I need to visit the region again earlier in October to see the best of it. We slowly made our way up the Hudson river, opposite us an endless row of trees in all their glory. Eventually, we made it to Rhinecliff, the nearest station to Woodstock. It’s 18 miles away from the town, which tells you all you need to know about the railways in the US.

Arriving in Woodstock, where we were staying with friends for a few days, I was struck by the beautiful blue sky and how perfect the town looked. Everything was bustling and almost every shop was selling something mystic, vintage or Woodstock related. The festival – the 1969 one and not the disastrous ‘99 version – is important to the town even though it was actually held 40 miles away in Bethel. That’s probably a pub quiz answer.

We had lunch at Bread Alone, which says it is a values-driven bread maker and cafe. I can vouch that it was all delicious and didn’t seem evil. We had a stroll around the town, which has a population of 5000 people, so it didn’t take long to see most of it, then we decided to walk up a street which soon had no pavement and was just road, so we turned around and took lots of photos of the colours of the trees. Back in the centre, we found an equivalent of a pub, called Pearl Moon, which was one of the few places open for drinks in the late afternoon. Ah, the humble pub, much imitated but never bettered. It’s one of the few British institutions which can’t be beaten. The music in Pearl Moon was at a loud enough volume to make reading impractical, so I soon gave up.

In the evening, we all went to Cucina, a restaurant in an old farmhouse that just oozed atmosphere, with gorgeous low lighting and long tables designed for eating in groups. It also went hard on the pumpkin-mania that was sweeping the east coast of America. Every table had pumpkins on, of all glorious shapes and sizes. In a concerning development, even the toilets had little pumpkins dotted artfully around the room. I don’t know about you, but when I am doing toilet, I don’t need decorative pumpkins in the room with me. If you find yourself in Woodstock, then do try out Cucina as it was not only a great place to visit but the food was great, with very generous portions of excellent pasta.

Back at our friends, I spent some time on their porch looking at the stars, in a gentle state of wonder. The stars are always there, if you can see them. In London, a starry night consists of experiencing the very brightest stars breaking through the light pollution but here I could see all sorts of stars, such as all the stars whose names I don’t know. I just know there were loads of stars.

The next morning I was taken on a hike up the Overlook Mountain Trail, which rises 3,140 feet above the town and I suddenly felt like my city lifestyle had caught up with me. Going up a steep trail for a long time is not what I am used to, so I did what I could to keep up with the pace, but every so often I had to stop and look at a rock/catch my breath. As we progressed up the paths, we came across an abandoned hulk of what was a hotel, which burnt down twice and was under reconstruction in the 1930s when they decided not to finish it, what with the fires and the days of the Catskills grand hotels being over. Being constructed out of concrete let it remain in surprisingly good condition to this day. As a big fan of The Shining, I decided that this hotel was the Overlook Hotel and nobody can tell me otherwise.

Every so often we saw signs reminding us that rattlesnakes might pop out and enliven the morning but once we reached the top, we met a man who was taking the signs down. The rattlesnakes had gone back home, or to their nest, or whatever it is that they do that means they were no longer a threat to us. Still, it added a little bit of danger to the hike. Right at the top of the mountain is a fire tower, which offers sensational views from its vantage point. I made it halfway up and suddenly had to descend. It felt a little too wobbly for my liking and what if a rattlesnake had slithered up the top, just waiting to attack.

After a long hike, it made perfect sense to walk back into Woodstock and have a sit down meal at Garden Cafe where I heard the same conversation quite a few times, which went along the lines of:

Customer: Do you have real milk?

Staff: We are a plant based cafe.

Customer: So, do you have real milk?

It didn’t matter, everything was great and Garden Cafe is a friendly reminder that vegan food is often much more inventive than meat options. How delicious do indian chickpea blinis sound, for goodness sake!

After this, we went for a stroll in the Comeau Property, which is a beautifully peaceful walk set out across 76 acres of meadows, river walks and woodland. The colours were, once more, glorious with deep blue skies and deep orange and russet tones on the trees. Standing still for a few minutes under a tree was enough for me to realise just how quickly the leaves were falling – and within a few days, all the remaining colour would be gone.

Throughout the day, we saw deer everywhere. Packs of them, just wandering around, looking serene for a split second before panicking and rushing off in every direction. Up in the sky, I enjoyed looking up and seeing all the birds whose names I did not know. However, I was able to take a ridiculously blurry shot of a bird to a keen ornithologist. He told me the bird was a Cardinal which is a gorgeous creature. It has a brilliant red body with a little outline of black around its face and the mix of the bird’s colour with the colour of the leaves was a sight to behold.

Later that afternoon, we hurled some more money down a black hole at Early Terrible which was a sort of mystical cocktail bar, set in a cosy log cabin. One thing that American toilets like to do is keep the lighting so low that it’s almost impossible to see what you’re doing in there. You could be aiming at a bin or a startled deer. But the bar was a cool place in which to enjoy the afternoon light and sights of Woodstock.

On our last day in Woodstock, we ventured out of town to Sloan gorge Preserve, which is apparently home to bears, raccoons and so forth, but no bear was forthcoming. As much as I thought I’d like to see one, I do think I would have probably just fainted in panic before being eaten alive, so it was for the best that we didn’t see one. Sloan Gorge is a canyon formed from an old quarry which was in operation in the late 1800s as well as a gorge formed in the ice age. It was a wonderful walk with probably the best trail markings I have ever seen. Most places have a few signs dotted about, so you get lost for days in the wilderness, but getting lost here would take real effort. The paths go on for a mile or so before you’re back in the car park.

After this, we visited Opus 40 sculpture park, which was built over 37 years by a man called Harvey Fite. He dedicated much of his life, having a cracking time making all sorts of marvellous sculptures from the remains of another bluestone quarry. He was once an actor and then changed his mind rather dramatically, travelling to Florence to learn tricks of the trade from sculptors there. Later on, he moves to the site of Opus 40 and then builds a house without plumbing and electricity and sets to making his sculptures. Now it is a warren of different sculptures for everyone to look at and in the summer, the site turns into an open air cinema.

In the evening, we had a meal at Silvia, which was described as “bucks deluxe” by one of our friends. I ignored this ominous warning at my peril. Bread and whipped butter with honey (sweet butter!!) was $15 a portion, and we had two. But it tasted so sensational, it was impossible to not keep ordering. Likewise, the restaurant did Brussels sprouts and they tasted heavenly. The mains were works of art, as were the cocktails. And again, the restaurant was enticing, set in a beautiful building with a lovely wraparound terrace for dining. An amazing meal to end my time in beautiful Woodstock.

A trip to Chernobyl

I visited Chernobyl and Ukraine in 2018 and had a fantastic time. I hope to go again as soon as I can.

The Ferris Wheel, that never got to be used

It could have been apocalyptic, a bang to set off a chain reaction of bangs that would shroud the world in a pall of radiation, poison the waters of Europe before leaching into the seas and oceans of the world. And yet, 32 years later it’s a tourist spot. Chernobyl is burned into the minds of people as a byword for disaster and as a child I was fascinated by what happened there. Even today it’s seen as a deadly place of silence and mutated creatures roaming the landscape. Having read a chunky history of the Chernobyl catastrophe, by Serhii Plokhii, there were so many missteps and calamities that it’s a minor miracle I’m able to type this and perhaps a bigger miracle that I was able to have lunch in the power plant’s canteen, just a few hundred metres away from where the explosion happened. Recently, a gleaming containment unit was slid into place, soaring above the old reactor and hastily assembled concrete sarcophagus that stopped the radiation completely escaping.

People know about the event itself in the broadest of terms, but often it is the people that lived around the plant who are forgotten, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of liquidators who worked tirelessly to lessen the effects of the disaster, potentially saving the world but subjecting themselves to personal catastrophes such as a lifetime of ill-health, or a swift but brutal death.

Reading Plokhii’s book, I could visualise a horrific image of the aftermath of the explosion. Chaos everywhere, chunks of radioactive graphite burning all around and people rapidly becoming sick. In a chain reaction, as one person got sick from the radiation, they’d struggle to tell someone coming in what had happened – perhaps also too terrified to even admit what they knew if they did know anything – and that new person would quickly get to work before they fell ill. Imagine that; it’d be like trying to evacuate a sinking ship while suffering from overwhelming sea sickness.

Booking a tour to the exclusion zone is easy; but to maintain the idea of danger, the tour company Go2Chernobyl plaster their website with radiation symbols and a strange promise to take you somewhere extreme, that’s also safe and comfortable. Which is true, I suppose, otherwise nearly 50,000 people wouldn’t have visited Pripyat in 2018. Hints that this isn’t a usual excursion come when you are required to book your trip in advance to obtain permits and the many email reminders that without passport details you won’t be allowed to enter the 30km exclusion and 10km exclusion zones.

We meet other intrepid adventurers on a gloomy day by Kyiv central train station. Nobody makes much of an effort to talk to one another, though that makes sense. We’re not exactly going bungee jumping. While we wait to go, we’re asked if we want to hire dosimeters but we choose not to. Some tours offer this and make the machines look rather scary, but I stick to the belief that this is just a money-making ploy; it’s safe enough to visit, so when the machine beeps a bit, it’s not going to reach a figure that’s meaningful. I absorbed more radiation in my flight to Ukraine from London than spending a day near the power plant and you don’t find the air stewards shoving dosimeters in your face the whole time. An idea for Ryanair, there.

On the journey to the exclusion zone, a video is put on with terrible CGI of the explosion and lots of people sounding earnest or sad, which is reasonable enough. Eventually, when we arrive, I step out and go to the toilet, which is just past the barrier that separates the normal world and the world of the exclusion zone. I witness a strange frisson of excitement as I pass through a little divide between everything being OK and things being not OK for hundreds of years and everything still looks exactly the same. A road leads forever deeper into the forest and nothing seems to be moving, so it certainly scored highly on the spooky atmosphere I thought would exist. We wait for an age at the checkpoint, seeing gorgeous dogs that I wanted to pet but thought better of.

We visit the town of Chernobyl and it looks like you might expect a run-down ex-soviet town to look but with some subtle differences. Utility pipes run above ground because the soil is contaminated so nothing can be buried underground. People still work here, but can only work 15 days in the zone and 15 off due to the build-up of radiation. Inside the town is a museum, filled with dolls and baby gas masks as well as information about what happened. In a side room there’s a large painting depicting the scene where the firefighters were attempting to put out the blazes at the plant. It’s strangely poignant to see it stored away from other items and there was also something very tragic about the painting knowing what we know now, seeing the effort and exertion in their faces. Despite the museum’s artefacts and modern installation, this painting was by far the most immediately shocking and arresting thing in there. Outside in the rain, the Wormwood Star memorial is a long line of names of abandoned towns and a large statue of an angel. Nearby is a statue of Lenin; it’s one of two that remain standing in Ukraine. The other is also in the exclusion zone, making this place feel even more like a timewarp.

Our second stop is the Duga radar station, which is a fascinating place I hadn’t heard about until I booked the tour. Our guides explained that the radar was designed to work out if the Americans had launched a missile, so the radar would bounce signals into the ionosphere, where it would have a look for anything to worry about, and messages would ping back. The scientists built the enormous station, over 100m high, 700m long, launched the system but never managed to get the signals to come back to Duga. It was doomed to fail, but was a colossal project that was so powerful, using up to 10 million watts, that it interfered with radio and TV signals around the world. So, it might not have stopped the Americans launching war, but it could make Coronation Street a bit fuzzy.

It’s a beautiful sight though and I would have happily spent an afternoon photographing it from every angle. It’s such a cold war remnant; a huge installation that the Russians thought could be hidden. Even as the reactor burned, officials didn’t want anyone to see Duga, fretting over whether to let Hans Blix from the Atomic Energy Agency drive to Chernobyl and be confronted by clouds of radioactive dust which would let him know that the explosion at the plant was worse than they said or fly there, but see the secret installation. In the end he flew there, and I doubt that Duga, as massive as it is, was ever really a secret.

Naturally, being a tourist site, people have put up some radiation signs near Duga, which are fake but during the day we see plenty of real ones.

After Duga, we heard towards the power station itself and get an idea of just how enormous the site is with power lines and pylons stretching out across a great swathe of land. Impressively, a solar panel array has recently been installed and a plan for the future is for more solar farms to be put across the exclusion zone. We also stop by the red forest, so called because it soaked up huge levels of radiation after the explosion, altering the colours of the trees. Almost instantly, this became one of the most irradiated places on the planet and even today, the soil is so contaminated that radiation levels are thousands of times above the norm, so we didn’t stop there for lunch.

We stopped in the Chernobyl power plant canteen for a sloppy lunch of red and brown coloured food that is bought in from the capital and on entering, we needed to go through a radiation scanner, which is nerve-shredding. It’s never revealed what would happen if you were the cause of a terrifying alarm, so I assumed you’d just have to live in the exclusion zone forever, serving up sloppy food to tourists that haven’t set the alarms off. I don’t know how the machines work but mine didn’t beep and for that, I am thankful.

Next up was Pripyat, the highlight of the trip, because for all the drama that happened at the nuclear plant, the town that has been left to nature is more interesting than the nuclear plant, where people still work. It was over 24 hours after the explosion at the plant that people started to be evacuated, some had spent the day after the explosion relaxing in the unusually pleasant weather. I read about a man who was sunbathing on the roof of his building, delighted at how easy it was to tan that day. He wasn’t aware that his tan was the beginning of radiation burns, which would slowly cause intense blistering across his body. Many people suffered the same fate and for the squeamish, looking up radiation burns is not for you.

Pripyat is not quite what it seems and I don’t think the experience could ever be genuine after such a long time and as it’s so famous. But as the minivan meets the guard in his checkpoint shack and enters the town, we immediately see the blocks of flats almost hidden behind thick stands of trees. Everything feels different, that this is not a town that bears relation to any you’ve seen before; it’s like an English garden city if the developers decided to build inside a wood and leave all the trees standing. Every so often the trees give way and a block rises up, stripped of any windows. If you were there at night, it’d be a terrifying place. Our first stop is the old swimming pool and our guide tells us that we can’t or aren’t supposed to go in, so advises us not to post anything on social media for a few days and takes us inside. It was hard to say if this was a trick to make us think we’re seeing something we shouldn’t be or they’re being a bit cheeky. We were told that the pool was still operating up until 1996, used by the liquidators but now you would easily think it was abandoned way before that. All the windows are gone, the pool long emptied and the structure is slowly decaying. Some of the group clamber up the diving board but I find myself interested in the large swimming pool sign on the floor that reminds me of the atomic logo with people swimming around it. There’s a clock still hanging on the wall but like everything here, it doesn’t work.

Later we visit and cross another group of tourists, armed with their dosimeters which aren’t making any noise. We head into a school that feels like it has been dressed for us, almost like a film set. Rows of windows frames are left open at the same angle for that pleasingly consistent look. Maybe for Instagram, a classroom floor is littered with children’s gas masks for the emotional sequence and school books are left open on pages with the benevolent face of Lenin staring out and others show soviet kids in the woods. It’s incredibly photogenic and I can’t stop snapping away. Late on, our guides show us before and after pictures, at one point showing us that a field we were in was once the town square. Nature has completely taken over much of the city with trees bursting through concrete, turning the old sports stadium into something more like a wood. We poke around the supermarket, which once was able to have signs for luxury foods and even have the food in stock, Pripyat being such an important town in the USSR. Near the supermarket the guides get their dosimeter out and poke it near a drain. There is distinct beeping, they explain that nobody knows what’s down the drain but nobody wants to find out.

Soon, our trip to Pripyat draws to a close and we pass the checkpoint back into the normal world. We wave goodbye to the atomic dogs and I wish I’d seen some atomic kittens for the comedy effect, but you can’t have everything. I think to the future, in my nuclear bunker/nursing home where I tell people that I visited Pripyat and think of what could have been.

Algeria: My favourite photos. Ghardaia, Beni Isguen and Bou Saada.

There are times that my trip to Algeria felt totally thrown together. Flights were booked there and back, the internal flight was pre-booked, but getting from place to place seemed to just happen because we ended up in the right place, people told us where to go and we had money to get around. To this day, I don’t feel I was ever ripped off in Algeria when travelling around the country, but I can’t say I was shown a price list in advance. Our exit from Timimoun to Ghardaia by coach was arranged by the hotel and they were 110% relaxed about sorting this out, to the extent that I wasn’t even 60% sure they knew if such a coach existed. The moment of truth arrived and a member of the hotel staff suddenly yells at us that our coach is outside and we have to leg it down the street to get on it. Relaxed.

I am struck that we twice needed a police escort in Timimoun but there was also no problem getting on a coach to another town. We settle in for lots of desert landscapes but the sand storm that had been turning the sky orange since the previous night reduced visibility. As we got further into the endless expanse of nothingness, I drifted in and out of sleep and got gently covered in sand from the open window. The road was not wide enough for the coach so we had a few hours of driving on rocks, which was even less comfortable than it sounds.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1280983-1024x576.jpg — Shades of orange

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1280989-1024x576.jpg — The road was not wide enough

We pulled into a sort of Algerian Moto services for a bit and looking around at the less than salubrious surroundings, I dreaded the loo situation but needed it regardless. In one of those strange circumstances I often find myself in when abroad, the people at the toilet entrance who clearly collected money waved me through, not wanting one dinar. The toilet was clean as a whistle, so I luxuriated in my visit. There was real poverty in the service station; people praying not prayer mats but flattened cardboard, flies buzzing around rancid looking meat, bins that looked like they needed to be put in a bin.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is IMG_0340-1024x768.jpg — There was no brochure, but if it existed, it wouldn’t include this image

We were headed for the town of Beni Isugen, in the M’Zab Valley. This part of Algeria interested us because it’s a UNESCO world heritage site due to the architecture of the towns, perfectly suited to the desert heat. I loved the buildings we saw as we got closer, which to me looked like little castles, with their crenellations and tiny windows to keep the searing heat out.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290023-1024x576.jpg — New Barratt homes, offering desert living

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290051-1-1024x576.jpg — Our castle/home in Beni Isguen

When we arrived in the town, we had to call our guide who would take us to his place. He arrived in an incredibly old car that had a plank of wood in it to stop something falling off and took us on a high-speed chase through town to a home that was equal parts castle and Tataouine dwelling. He told us to settle in and that he’d be back soon with food. My friend and I are pretty patient people but after two hours, we started to wonder a) where we were b) did we give our passports to the right guy and c) when is the food coming. But the castle was incredible, unlike anywhere I’d ever stayed before. Eventually our guide returned with the biggest amount of food I’d ever seen and later I slept fitfully as dogs howled outside while I lay on 10 mattresses.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290032-1-1024x576.jpg

The towns of the M’Zab valley are tourist destinations so when we visited the old town of Beni Isguen and Ghardaia, we needed guides to show us round and tell us the rules. A rule they were really keen on was not to photograph the women. They wear a white haik, which is a large cloth wrapped around the body and the women only have one eye visible at any one time. When I saw the women, their hand was clutching at the cloth so that they could see and keep everything in place. It’s such a fascinating set of towns, and incredibly picturesque.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290081-1024x576.jpg — Style guide

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290083-1024x576.jpg

Both Beni Isguen and Ghardaia were engrossing and it became clear that the structure of the towns followed a similar pattern. The buildings are tightly packed into a circular formation and at the centre is a mosque. The minaret is a watchtower. UNESCO estimate that these towns were built between 700 and 1000 years ago, with little changing in that time. I was so excited to be amongst all this history, but it all came crashing down when I first spotted some graffiti saying “hip-hop” and then heard a Samsung ringtone. So, it’s mostly an old way of living.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290149-1024x576.jpg — Ghardaia main market square

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290070-1024x576.jpg — Ghardaia from far away

In Beni Isguen, we walked through a square that was jaw-droppingly gorgeous. We arrived at the time of day where the light struck against the walls in such a way that everything glowed, with the sky a shade of blue that even photoshop couldn’t improve.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290274-1024x683.jpg — Beni Isguen square

In an unexpected turn of events, our guide told us we’d be popping by the celebrations of a wedding. It was split, so we never saw the bride or any women at all, but what struck me was the friendliness of everyone who acted as if two Brits turning up at the wedding was the most natural thing to occur. I loved seeing how the men fussed over kids and how efficient the serving of couscous, meat and veg was. Later, we went to a sort of after-party, where mint tea was served and I noticed that there was always enough for me and my friend – yet more friendliness from the hosts. They shot guns into the air and ground a couple of times, but I think I managed not to shriek and hurl my tea in the air.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290194-1-1024x576.jpg — Wedding

After a wonderful couple of days in Ghardaia, we made our way to Bou Saada, which is perhaps the least interesting town in existence. It could be that we didn’t arrange for a guide to show us the town or there was just nothing to do, but really, Bou Saada was a pitstop on the way back to Algiers. Our hotel was amazing, with beautiful gardens and a pool but there’s only so many circuits of the garden you can do before madness kicks in. An art gallery provided some relief for an hour or so, but there’s really not much to say.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290335-1024x576.jpg — The birds get a great view

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290347-1024x576.jpg — Child. Running.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1290378-1024x683.jpg — Waterwheel of delights.

My friend told me recently that the reason we wanted to go to Algeria in the first place was because of Constantine, a city with incredible bridges going over a gorge. We never got to visit, but that only makes me more keen to go back to Algeria and explore even more of this fascinating country.

A food tour…of Athens

If I had been counting calories in my time in Athens, I would have swiftly realised I was pregnant with triplets. The food was endless and almost all of it was gooey, yummy, delicious and with enough vegetables to trick the mind into thinking it was healthy. But healthy food has never tasted as good as the food in Athens. My friend, Rokos, had planned a day of doing little but eating and doing some walking between food stops to give us the illusion of exercise.

Part 1: We started at one of his favourite places, Stani. It’s one of a dying breed of dairy bars in the city and is in a neighbourhood that has seen better days. This isn’t an austerity comment, as most of Athens looks and feels like a normal functioning city but Omonia just looks tired. Watch your step as you could trip over some jagged pavement, avoid the overflowing bins and eventually you’ll arrive at Stani. It’s tiny and looks like it hasn’t changed in decades, which is exactly how it should be. The offering is simple and excellent; we had sheep yogurt with honey, a cake containing custard that oozes out when you break the pastry as well as coffee. The first mouthful was so good that suddenly the surroundings became palatial and glorious.

Part 2: Our second stop was Loukoumades Ktistakis, which sells very little but the eponymous fried honey balls. There are a few tables inside but this is the sort of place where you order, eat in one mouthful, make a face that is close to the face of someone that’s just seen God (and when he does return, he’ll go there and do the face of god when he tastes these). This is food that cracks open into a gooey mess, but it gets a thumbs up from everyone.

Part 3: The central food markets. This has the potential to go either way, once you enter the meat and fish section. As someone who has mostly given up meat, walking through a giant hall filled with flesh of every kind being cut up wasn’t very pleasant. Even the beaks and hooves on display didn’t fill me with joy. So I learned that I’m further along the vegetarian marker than I’d realised but not quite there. But the markets don’t just do meat, they do anything you could imagine and I always find a large array of brightly coloured vegetables really soothing. The real pleasure I get from them is seeing ingredients I don’t usually come across, which gets me thinking about what I’m going to cook next. It’s the same when you see spices piled high; reminding me of a middle eastern souk. The markets bring to mind a time before everything came pre-measured, in a glass jar or plastic pouch and I foresaw my past-self going round the stalls, haggling over prices before stopping off for a quick coffee. In this past life, I almost certainly had a wheely trolley full of the day’s shopping.

Part 4: The Mediterranean Grocery store is a superb deli that instantly made me want to live in Athens so I could pop by here all the time. Holiday mode does this to me; we have these sort of deli’s in London and even in Walthamstow, but still. I was in love. Aisles stacked high with every sort of olive oil imaginable, biscuits, different types of pasta, pickled things, wine. It all just looked so enticing and I cursed my lack of hold luggage on the flight back. Consequently, my phone is full of photos of Greek produce I’ll always be on the lookout for.

Part 5: Nikita’s. After various bites across the city, it was time for a big meal and Nikita’s has a great atmosphere of ‘home-cooked food by mum’ plus an outstanding cat having a snooze on one of the outdoor chairs. In my world, this is as good as getting a positive Jay Rayner review. At Nikita’s, we ate as much as the table would hold, from moussaka, to dolmades to vegetable stew and saganaki, all washed down with beer.

It got me thinking about the food of my childhood which was in no way as rich and varied as this. It was more of a traditional British meat-n-two-veg household, the kind of place where boiling a cauliflower until it’s a limp and soggy tragedy was deemed blanching. We didn’t eat cheese, ever, and adventures in seafood went as far as cod in a parsley sauce. It wasn’t battered! Watch out Heston. When I lived with my Nan, she somehow decided I was a maniac for lamb chops and chicken chasseur and even twenty years after her death, I still fondly think of her getting on the bus – the number 18 in Birmingham if you like buses – to go to the butcher’s so she could get the meat. But still, no cheese.

After all the food and reminiscing, we needed some perking up to stop us all falling into a food coma so when we found Dope Coffee we were all delighted. Not only do they serve great coffee in a very (I hate myself for saying it) Insta-friendly backdrop but more importantly, some superb cinnamon buns that were so good we found additional space in our already-distended stomachs for them. Hands down, one of the best cinnamon buns I’ve eaten in my life. It poses a threat to everything Scandinavia holds dear, it’s that good.

God seems to figure today with the holy dough balls and the holy bun, so it was obvious that we needed to follow this up by going to church. And so we walked to the Metropolitan Church of Athens which is pretty enough, but in its shadow is the very cute Church of Virgin Mary Gorgoepekoos and Saint Eleutherius, bringing some 12^th century swagger into the heart of modern day Athens. Inside, it is a showcase of what churches do so well; it feels intimate and calm while also as chintzy as you like. Cracks in the walls indicate the damage earthquakes can have on the city.

Next up was Syntagma Square, which I am familiar with from the austerity riots and also that time that Jason Bourne ran through the square mid mayhem to do something in a film. It is a becalmed place now, featuring the mighty Evzones guarding the President. Let’s take a moment to admire their uniform. A cap with a tassel, a shirt with flared sleeves for that Studio 54 look, stockings made of wool, clogs with a pom pom on and a gun. The clogs, presumably, are for kicking as they weigh 1.5kgs each and the pom pom is for fun. The gun is to shoot people dead. It is endearing for nations to keep these ridiculous traditions, and the world would look far less interesting without them. Take off the bearskin cap of the British Foot Guards and not only would they be able to see, but they’d just look boring. Anyway, my main point is that the military really embraces a camp aesthetic and should be applauded for how progressive that is.

On this whistle stop tour of the foods and sights of Athens, we still had more to see and so we walked through the national gardens which featured palm trees that rivalled those seen in LA, or perhaps it should be the other way round. The National Garden is a pleasant park though fairly tiny place at just 38 acres but it’s a green haven in the city with its own set of ancient ruins (to be honest, it’s hard not to find an ancient remain in Athens) and leads to many more sights such as Zappion Gardens and the Panathenaic Stadium which held the first modern Olympics. As stadiums go, it’s so simplistic in form and a beauty to look at. However, I can’t imagine it’d be too pleasant to sit there for many hours in the sun, roasting slowly.

As we headed closer to sunset, we took a cab to Mount Lycabettus, taking the cable car up 227 metres, meaning we were the highest people in the city. It got me thinking about exactly how high it was up there, and the Shard reaches 300m so there’s a little fun fact for you. When you reach the top, there’s little in the way of space as you’re on a small peak and there is a restaurant, bar, church with neon lights and a spectacular viewing point. Everyone is crowding for the best spots but with some patience, you’ll get the shot in the end. Most people tend to choose the cable car to go up and to walk down, savouring the sublime views of a deep red sky filtering over the top of the city and seeing all the lights spread out for miles. Having never been to LA, I reckon that LA looks like this from up the highest points in the city.

In theory, walking down the hill is an excellent idea but my friends and I took a wrong turn at some point and ended up walking down the hill with phone torches as our only light and coyotes hungry for our blood. Maybe it was a cat. It wouldn’t have been great fun to trip and break a leg here and dear reader, I didn’t. We eventually fell off the hill and into sight of this gorgeous modern building that was like a little slice of Zaha Hahid with its gorgeous curves and immaculate finishing. Back in civilisation, we found a bar, we found wine and we found more food to eat. It was glorious.

Edvard Munch at the British Museum

Once, in Oslo’s National Museum, I was one of four people in the world looking at their copy of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The painting was accompanied by a guard and was behind a case as it kept getting nicked, but other than that, my friends and I were blissfully alone with this masterpiece and free to admire it from as many angles as we pleased. Imagine being able to say the same of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers or Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, now eternally blocked not only by people but also their smartphones.

Fast forward some years, and the British Museum’s Edvard Munch exhibition is a hellscape of tourists and people craning their necks to see the works on display, but what works they are. The lithograph of The Scream (1895) is no less sensational when viewed up close, and I was able to see it in a brief moment when the hordes were elsewhere. The exhibition is a detailed exploration of his work and influences and starts with a self-portrait of Munch with a skeleton hand. It sets the tone of everything that follows, one of despair, morbidity and grief that haunted his work throughout his life. To say the exhibition shows a man obsessed with the fragility of life is an understatement.

His life seemed to be a series of miserable situations, from his mother dying when he was five to his sister dying when he was thirteen. When you add to this the mental health of another sister and his own mental collapse, fuelled by alcohol, you can appreciate that his exhibition is not one filled with joy and it makes sense that the images he made lack human warmth and joy.

On display were Head by Head (1095) where a couple appear to be embracing, but the print suggests they are in the act of consolation rather than love. Eye in Eye (1894) shows a couple not looking at each other, but through each other. The woman’s hair covers much of her face and the man is a pallid colour, with sockets for eyes.

Other images show mothers, stricken in grief or children, holding their head in their hands as their own mothers lay dead. On display are versions of Dead Mother and child (1900) where a child is looking at us, wide eyed in disbelief and covering her ears. It’s a potent image that stayed with me throughout the exhibition.

Next to images by Munch are are examples of works he was inspired by, including the incredible Acid Thrower (1894) by Eugène Samuel Grasset. This work, showing a woman on edge holding a cup full of sulphuric acid that would disfigure a love rival, looks so modern and violent. Her hair is a shock of deep red, with a red background that makes her slightly green skin feel all the more sinister.

Munch was also inspired by Odilon Redon, whose Obsession left me in a momentary daze. There was something about the painting that made me think about how my own worries and anxieties would appear, if painted. I felt it was something like this, so much so that images I’d never seen felt familiar. What was most impressive about the exhibition is the multitude of ways in which sadness is displayed and how relatable it all was; human frailty on display is a frightening and beautiful thing. This frailty was sometimes evident in the ways the pictures seemed too harshly rendered, but most obviously in the hollow faces of people. Munch was quoted as saying he wouldn’t alter his moods because he owed so much of his output to this, which suddenly gives a sense of humanity to everything he did and everything displayed in the room.

The best place to see Munch’s work is the Munch museum in Oslo, currently moving to a new waterfront building in the city centre. It will open in 2020.

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