Memories of Kyiv – Part 1

I visited Ukraine in 2018, and had a brilliant time there. Naturally, some of the information in my diary will be out of date in 2022 but this is a reminder of what it was like to visit a young democracy and a wonderfully vibrant city.

At times, I like to stress my mum out. It’s a sort of bloodsport. Not content with worrying her in Algeria, where she shrieked things like “Won’t ISIS kill you? Will you be kidnapped? The Sahara desert?! I’ll stand in front of the aeroplane and stop you!!” I decided to delight with her my plans to visit the site of the Chernobyl disaster and the abandoned town of Pripyat. She was clearly less bothered with this, because she only said she’d block up the front door to stop me sending “radioactive postcards”. I’m grateful she didn’t know about the whole war with Russia thing. 32 years on from Chernobyl, there’s no consensus on Ukraine; you’re either crazy to go or you’d be crazy not to go. Honestly, I think there’s more chance of dying from boredom listening to people worry than there is in going to Pripyat for the day.

Needless to say, there’s much more than the world’s worst nuclear disaster and accompanying deformed animals (the ones I saw looked fine to me) to Ukraine and Kyiv is the ideal starting point to explore. After landing at the airport, where any traveller’s heart will get a little thrill from the unfamiliar language, a taxi ride will swiftly take you through endless Soviet blocks, some of which are atrocities to architecture and others endearingly insane. There are three blocks, reminiscent of giant futuristic hairdryers, by Pozniaky metro station that equally delighted and disgusted me.

We were staying at a hotel that is simply one of the best slices of modernist architecture I’ve ever seen. It’s certainly the most stylish hotel I’ve stayed in, from the outside. Hotel Salute is a cylindrical beauty that reminds me of the Capitol Records building in LA, but with a slightly sinister edge, partly due to the circular windows at the top of the building that give a feeling of being spied upon. It should have been more akin to a skyscraper, but due to arguments during the design phase, it was cut in half. It remains a building that has a sirens call of “photograph me”, which I did at every opportunity.

The Salute’s lobby is a wonder of shiny metal panels that could be lifted from a sci-fi film, at the point when we meet the inhabitants of an evil alien ship. It’s a lobby entirely at odds with the exterior. In the evening, a cardboard cut-out of Marilyn Monroe gets brought out to invite us to see the sexy ladies performing in the room where breakfast is served; as I didn’t take advantage of this I couldn’t tell you if the sexy ladies were writhing over the cold cuts or not.

Our first stop after marvelling and photographing the hotel for hours was Syndicate Beer and Grill. Once again, I make a first stop on an exciting foreign holiday somewhere totally familiar and unexotic. When in Jordan, I took my friend to a bar that served Cottage Pie and young Jordanians danced to Rhianna. At Syndicate, there is no cottage pie, but there is heavy use of neon, bare brick walls and filament lightbulbs that could have you thinking you’re in Shoreditch in 2013. It feels in no way Ukrainian until we order an item on the menu called pickled fries, which sounded interesting. One slight mistranslation later and we received fried pickles which are much nicer than I’d have imagined. We also ordered a nano portion of parmesan fries – the staff should have served them with a magnifying glass, so measly was the offering. The beer was brewed on site and was fantastic. By the end of my second drink, it also struck me that this beer was strong. The steps leading up to the exit had “who’s going to be drunk” written on them. The answer was obvious.

After this, we went to Arsenla metro station, the world’s deepest underground station, which goes 105 metres beneath the surface. Heading down one very long escalator, my friend proclaimed the metro was deep but nothing special. Naturally, the second escalator was just around the corner and when we timed it, the journey from entrance to platform takes 4m 32s. I guess it had to stop at some point before we entered the bowels of hell.

Deep as it is, the Kyiv metro is a wonderful bargain at 22p a journey and it even takes contactless payments. It’s like some futuristic miracle. If you’re in any way interested in the architecture of travel, you’ll find yourself trapped in photograph loops in many of the stations, forgetting what you were supposed to be doing. While no Moscow metro, it’s still a superb system that puts many Western European metros to shame.

Eventually, our stomachs reminded us we were hungry so we head to a Georgian restaurant, home of my favourite cuisine. Having been to Tbilisi and Batumi, getting to eat this food first-hand, I had high expectations for Shoti, if only we could find it. My downloaded map of the neighbourhood directed me to a building site and then an alleyway. Lots of backtracking later we realise that Shoti is unhelpfully written to sort of look like WOTV with the Ukrainian for restaurant underneath. But once inside, the decor of the restaurant and the logo of the restaurant, in the shape of an Adjarian khachapuri, reassures you that all is well. Shoti feels swish and the staff are friendly and attentive.

We ordered our favourite Georgian dishes of badrijani, khachapuri and khinkali, washed down with wine. The badrijani, aubergine with walnuts and coriander, was as good as I’ve ever tasted it. The khachapuri, a bread made with a sort of pickled cheese, dripped gooey mess all over my plate and was clearly very bad for me but tasted magnificent. The main part of the meal, khinkali, a meat dumpling, was outstanding. By this point, we were too full for pudding. A shame, as Georgian puddings can be very good, but they’ll never eclipse the starters and mains. Former Soviet states seem to have Georgian restaurants all over the place and it’s easy to see why. The flavours couldn’t be any fresher, with heaps of coriander wrestling for your attention alongside cherries, garlic, pomegranate and walnut. The cuisine is far removed from the stodge people often think of when they think of eastern European food. Perhaps it’s simple geography that helps make Georgian food a blend of Mediterranean and Caucasian cooking. Either way, in Kyiv make sure you visit at least one of the many Georgian restaurants. You might realise it’s the food you’ve been missing all along.

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 little trip to… York

2020 really is the year that just keeps on giving. In the summer, those wild and carefree days where we could go out and see people without the fear that they would kill us, I planned an Autumn trip to Yorkshire. It would have been my first proper trip to Yorkshire as in the past I have only been to Keighley and Leeds for short trips. The trip I was to take would start in York, moving to Harrogate and Knaresborough. Walks along the River Ouse and Nidd Gorge were planned. But the start of October saw coronavirus rates rise rapidly in York at the same time that tiers were being introduced and I just didn’t feel too thrilled about everything unravelling like a rusty old slinky. So the trip was ditched and, stuck with some expensive tickets, we chose in the end to spend just a day in York. A day in York is still a day well spent.

When we arrive in York, it is raining and the forecast is for rain all day. The wise words of a friend ring in my ears. York will be wonderful whatever the weather. He was right. York announces itself as a gorgeous place a few minutes outside of the train station as you cross the river and the city walls come into view. While there are some modern bits, they pale into significance and grandeur next to many of the surrounding buildings. Even in the soggy weather, York looks like a place you want to explore.

We wanted to go to Betty’s tea room for lunch but despite the pandemic, there was a queue outside and there wasn’t anything to shelter us from the rain so we found an alternative in Mannion and Co, just up the road. Having the benefit of an awning, we briefly waited before being shown inside to a world of cosiness and the most wonderful accents. Honestly, just a few words from people from Yorkshire is a real treat to the ears. With Bettie’s oversized presence (not saying she’s fat, just that she’s everywhere) there must be a need to be a really good café to compete and Mannion and Co bring their game in eyesight of Bettie’s hard stare. The sausage roll was excellent as was the coffee. The cinnamon bun was somewhat dry, but I have had worse. Next door is the Yorkshire Soap Co, which smells gorgeous inside. Being not as overwhelming as heading into a Lush and getting a migraine, I could distinguish smells here so bought some early Christmas gifts. For my mum, a mojito bath bomb. She doesn’t like mojitos and doesn’t use any smelly gifts I get here because “then I will have used them!” But still, it looked nice so she’s getting it.

I had heard much about York Minster, most recently in the aftermath of the awful fire at Notre Dame. The fire at York was compared to the one in Paris, and at the time I read about how they managed to repair the damage using traditional techniques, which people still seem to think no longer exist. The Rose window at York had 40,000 cracks in it and they repaired that and they fixed the rather pressing issue of the missing roof. The incredible thing is that there is no sign whatsoever that a fire ravaged York Minster. It’s a real testament to the talent of the people involved in the work.

In 2019, over 700,00 people visited the minster, and so it would usually be busy during half term but of course there was no queue to enter and the whole site was really quite empty. The benefit was that we could really explore to our heart’s content and get a sense of just how impressive the minster is. The central tower is as tall as a 21 story building, it’s wider than a football pitch, and there are 2 million pieces of glass in the hundreds of stained glass windows. There is nowhere in the UK with more stained glass and the earliest pieces are from the 12^th century. I have to be honest and say this melts my brain just a little bit.

The nave naturally gives some grand views, showing off the sheer enormity of the place but it’s when you look a bit closer that you see the glitz of the minster. Having the space to really explore the whole place was wonderful. There are little details everywhere. Signs abound banging on about the size of their organ, which seems appropriate for the church. This organ has 5,403 pieces and it has been taken to Durham for a once-in-a-century renovation. When we were there people were hoovering the outside of the organ with a sort of dust buster, which is not something I ever thought I’d witness.

Perhaps the most beautiful part of the minster is the Chapter House, which was finished in 1290 and so is just a mere 730 years old. It was in this year where some crazy things happened, and in a way, things back then felt just as messy as they are now. Only they had much brighter people than Dominic Raab appearing on the telly, or whatever they watched the Brexit negotiations on in those days. The Chapter house is a wonder, with some architectural details that are seriously impressive. The building’s ceiling doesn’t have a column to support the ceiling, which shows off the abilities of the builders. There are gargoyles aplenty throughout the room, which have some bizarre sights, including all sorts of animals doing ghastly things. If you want to see demonic pigs, men having their eyes plucked out or a head dug into with claws, this is your one-shop stop.

After we sampled the glories of the minster, we walked across town via Shambles to the art gallery. Shambles used to have a lot of butchers, as many as 25 in 1875 but have now all gone, replaced mostly with Harry Potter shops and tourist tat emporiums. Anywhere remotely old trades on some sort of Harry Potter connection, and York has done its work convincing people that Shambles is the real Diagon Alley. JK Rowling says she’s never been, which would surprise me as she seemed to write her books in every café in the UK. Perhaps I am being deceived. It is a wonderful street, but even when we visited, it was still fairly full of people taking photographs and gaping at the oldness of it all. I obviously took photographs of the people and the buildings. It is a shame that all too quickly, my Shambles experience was over so we headed to the art gallery which though small, has plenty of diverting pieces in the collection, including some L.S. Lowry and pop art. Most interesting was a video by Laura Besancon called Alone, Together which was a wonderfully simple but effective idea. A letter was sent to residents of a series of high rise towers in London, asking them to play a song at a specific time and turn their lights on and off to the beats of the music. None of the people doing this could see one another, but the video captured what it looked like from the outside. I found it quite moving in the context of 2020 and how alone we’ve all felt at times. The art gallery also hosts the Centre of Ceramic Arts, which is the world’s largest collection of 20^th century British pottery. Some of the work on display is incredible. I have no idea how they make some of the protrusions and knobbly bits, so it all looked quite magical. The Anthony Shaw Space is a highlight, with his extensive collection housed in what looks like a living room and there are also works by Picasso, who shows that he can put funny faces on canvas as well as vases.

At the rear of the gallery is a gorgeous garden full of plants and herbs from all around the world and then, quite unexpectedly the ruins of St Mary’s Abbey Church come into view. York museum gardens is a wonderful spot in the city and the ruins really add history to the area. I can’t help but find it fascinating that the Abbey has been left to become ruins since the dissolution in 1539, without bulldozing what was left and turning the site into a car park. At the end of the walk, we find a bar and restaurant that oozes coziness. The Starr Inn the City might have a clumsy name, but we were sat right by the wood burning stove, watching the rain through the windows. In that moment, York felt like home.

After reluctantly leaving the pub, we went to walk around the city walls in the last gasps of daylight, only to find that much is changed due to covid. One way systems and plenty of locked gates later, we managed to walk a few hundred metres of the wall in the wrong direction before getting tangled in two sets of people, walking in opposite directions. The stretch of wall we got to walk along was a delight, but obviously this lack of real walk means I will need to visit again, which is no hardship. A final walk around the city centre before the train home showed York at its best, the streets mostly empty and looking enticing with their Christmas decorations up. It’s a beautiful place and whenever I go somewhere this beautiful, I always kick myself at having never been before. Yorkshire, I am coming back.

Algeria: My favourite photos. Algiers and Timimoun.

Back in the heady days of 2016, a friend and I flew to Algeria because we could. Reading back on my travel diaries to understand why Algeria appealed, I wrote

Here’s the thing about Algeria: nobody really knows where it is. People are shocked to find it has a Mediterranean coast, that it’s less than three hours from London, that it exists at all. My mum thought I shouldn’t go, without quite knowing why. This is what led a friend and I to choose Algeria as our holiday destination of 2016 after we realised Iran is a dry country and, crucially, only lets Brits in if we go as part of a tour. Uzbekistan lost its charms when we couldn’t easily find more to do than whiz around the Tashkent metro eating plov, described in a guide book as “an oily dish”. Earning bonus points, too, was that Algeria has no current travel guide by anyone.

Algeria offered the novelty of boarding an aeroplane at Heathrow in the morning and having a late lunch in Africa in the afternoon. Looking back on those photos in 2021, the trip feels remarkably exotic and exciting so I wanted to pick out some of the favourite photos from the trip.

We spent the first day getting to know the city centre. There is a distinctly French colonial flavour to many of the buildings in the Bab el Oued district, and it is clear that a lot of care has gone into retaining the charm of the buildings. Alger la blanche is startlingly beautiful up close. Without guide books, our walk in the city centre took us wherever looked good and by chance we found the museum of modern art. It’s based in a stunning neo-moorish building, dating back to 1901, that photographs wonderfully.

The Casbah is part of the city that feels very different to the French part of the city and my friend and I went on a walking tour of the city which takes in some gorgeous buildings. There are attempts at bringing the Casbah back to life, but it’s a slow paced affair and many of the structures are in a parlous state, with bits of wooden scaffold propping up drooping walls. We walked from the middle of the Casbah down to the sea. On the way we were able to go up on a roof of building to see the city out beneath us. From the top it looked like a city of satellite dishes. Halfway through the tour we stopped by a cafe for a mint tea.

The bench situation has room for improvement.

At the bottom of the Casbah, there’s a busy market and every building has fabrics hanging off balconies and more satellite dishes. I remember that street being an assault on all the senses.

From Algiers, we took a teeny tiny plane out to Timimoun in the Saharan Desert. On board I could hear a bird squawking which didn’t help my ever-present worry that the plane will disassemble in the air. But the bird was in a cage, covered in a bin bag, and apparently this was totally normal. The bird experienced the novel concept of flying and I am sure it was most pleased. The flight from Algiers to Timimoun took us swiftly into the desert where I couldn’t stop looking at the never-ending emptiness and figuring out how I’d survive if we crashed into the sand. As time passed, I realised it would be impossible. But it looked incredible from the air.

On landing, our passports were whisked out of our hands at pace and then we sat about on different benches of the airport for a bit, looking outside at the Algerian flags fluttering in the wind and waiting for our passport to come back. Perhaps our UK passports merited close attention but it was at least 40 minutes before we had them back. The Police enquired as to how we’d get to our airport and spotting a taxi rank outside the airport, we said we’d call a cab. Ah, no. Due to fears of terrorism, the Algerian government had put in measures in place so that we’d need to be picked up at the airport by someone from our hotel and then accompanied there by a police vehicle. An escort, how exciting!!

Some time later, we arrived at the Gourara Hotel, where the strangeness of a Police escort was immediately replaced by a standard hotel check in and the view of the hotel pool, with families splashing about in it. The hotel faced a Palmeraie that stretched out until a sebkha (salt lake) and then dunes rising up miles away. I can’t recall being so shut off from the rest of the world, in the sense that though I had wifi, I was nearly 800 miles from Algiers and flights were irregular. It was quite an exciting feeling.

The next day we arranged for a guide to take us to the salt lake, and again, we needed an escort. We hung about outside a police station for a bit with our guide saying if they weren’t available, there would be no tour. However, soon we had some men with guns taking us out. The whole process was handled well. The police didn’t interfere with our tour and we saw some wonderful sights. We visited an abandoned village that is situated on top and under a hill. Under the ground, you could, even in April, notice the temperature change. I can only imagine how hellish it would be in the summer. The abandoned village was fascinating to walk through and it was a surprisingly complex set of structures that have survived.

Later on, we were driven around the dunes, which towered above us and looked magnificent. It was at this point that our police escort got stuck in the sand and our driver had to walk a fair distance to help them. We were surprisingly relaxed about this turn of events. But then, the two times I have been to a desert, I have found myself utterly content with the vast silence and emptiness of the landscape.

Our guide, going to rescue our police escort.

After our guide rescued out escort, we stopped by a tourist shop which had a reindeer for sale. I wonder if that was for tourists or something totally exotic for locals. Then we popped by a cave where I bought a scary looking fossil off some guys who were selling this stuff. I didn’t see any other visitors clamouring for them and wondered what they did all day.

I was delighted to see salad being grown in the desert, using little irrigation channels that our guide washed his face in. The sudden green of the delicate leaves against the orange of the sand transformed the landscape.

After the tour of the salt lake and the abandoned village, we decided to check out the town of Timimoun and get some money exchanged at a bank. It was a strange thing to need an escort for some things but not others. Nobody stopped us when we went into the town and at no point did we feel uncomfortable, though I certainly appreciated the effort the Algerian authorities went to in keeping us safe. The town itself is pretty small, with lots of interesting architecture and it looked even more mysterious and compelling with a glow in the sky from an oncoming dust storm.

Looking back at these photos reminds me why I love travelling so much. Getting to visit other countries and experience their sights and cultures is one of the most fulfilling things I can ever expect to do.

A little trip to…Ironbridge

The final destination of the West Midlands Odyssey was Ironbridge, a small town I have wanted to visit for a long time. Having been, I can say that this was a wise travel decision. Ironbridge is utterly bewitching. On my return to London, I started working out where I’d live in the town and if I could move somewhere that had a view of the gorge and ideally, the bridge. The journey from Ludlow to Ironbridge was in parts nice and a bit bleak. Arriving at Telford Central, we wait at the bus stop that will take us near to our hotel. Unfortunately, the first bus driver doesn’t know what Ironbridge is because he lives in Wolverhampton. I live in London but I know what Ironbridge is. The second bus driver seems equally confused and suggests a route that takes 50 minutes instead of 25. In the end I have to just take faith that Google knows the way better than the bus driver, so we settle in to a journey of a lifetime. We’re treated to the sounds of a thoroughly stressed out mum telling her kid to shut up the entire way before we get off at an unlovely stop that looks a million miles away from the pictures of Ironbridge I’d seen. We proceed to head down paths that get steeper and steeper until we’re not so much walking down a hill as sliding down. Thanks to the zig zag streets, we escape plummeting into a void by becoming human pinballs that stumble out into streets that look more appealing by the minute.

We stayed at The White Hart that is a delightful pub minutes away from the bridge that looks out onto the River Severn. The information pack to the hotel includes some outrageous sentences that belong in the 1970s, such as “Chinese restaurant, called something unpronounceable – pretty nice” which reminded me that Telford and the Wrekin voted for Brexit by a large margin. It all made sense. Casual xenophobia aside, The White Hart does great beers, even some foreign ones. It also has a covered terrace, ideal for the weather and the space it affords us from other people. I assume Ironbridge is overrun with tourists in a normal summer, but it was still busy with tourists queuing for ice creams and anything cold when we were there. We had lunch at the Malthouse pub which is about as hipster as Ironbridge gets, with bizarre toilets that look like they’re out of a western. Men don’t pee into urinals, but tin buckets. Inexplicable. Outside, music choices include The Libertines, Franz Ferdinand and Jamie T. When I say hipster, I am talking about 35 year olds and over who were cool once but now live in Ironbridge. But this was the music from my youth so I was more than happy.

After lunch, I entrusted my life and sanity with a walk from The Guardian, from 2009. Things have changed since this walk was written and it was a challenging, frustrating and at times, hateful walk. We start by walking along the river, but soon get stuck in brambles and spend time staring at partially capsized boats. We re-route and end up on a busy road, hoping that we won’t end up flung into a hedge by a truck. The landscape the walk suggests we walked through is a million miles away from the overgrown nightmare that takes up much of the route. Some parts have been vaguely maintained, which is the only thing that keeps us from not abandoning the whole thing. The walk through the meadows alongside the meandering Severn is very pleasant, with butterflies everywhere as well as dragonflies whizzing about. It is after the meadow that things become bleak. We cross the river by the bridge at Buildwas and walk down a path by a quarry, with dust swirling in the air. The guide says to walk down this grim road and head towards a caravan park. Eventually we find where we’re supposed to go and hack our way through fields that are chest high with brambles, nettles, weeds and probably snakes, too. The guide says to cut through a field. A tangle of barbed wire stops this. We alter our tracks again and somehow end up in the caravan park where, in a brief moment of joy, we see three deer eating grass. Then, we walk up a steep hill, following the soothing sounds of electricity pylons buzzing above us. By this point, I wanted to punch the entire walk, if only I could have found a way.

Once we get past the pylons and vertical climb, we broke free into some proper countryside, only an hour or so after we started the cursed walk. Soon, despair gives way to a sense of relief as we can relax into the views around us and we walked in the direction of Benthall Hall, which looks very nice indeed. Naturally, it’s closed. On Spout Lane we see people filling up large containers of spring water from the pipe on the side of the road. Not long after, Ironbridge comes back into view and the road leads us directly onto the iron bridge which looks gorgeous from every angle. It really is an incredible feat of engineering, the first bridge of its kind built in 1777 and opened three years later. The bridge recently went under a year of repair work where it was entirely covered up as they worked on it, turning the colour of the bridge from grey to a deep red, the colour of the bridge when it was first built. The red works so well that I can’t imagine it looking any better than it did when we visited.

In the evening we ate at The White Hart and it was excellent; the heritage tomato salad with dashi and red wine vinegar was outstanding as was my seafood main. We rounded the night off by walking back to the bridge to see it lit up beautifully, watching the insects have a party all around. Despite the partially hellish walk, Ironbridge was something of a revelation in its beauty.

The next morning was our last day and we wanted to make the most of it by going on a walk that didn’t involve a nervous breakdown so we walked from the hotel towards Bedlam Furnaces which to me sounded like an old asylum where the inmates smelted stuff, but I was wrong. It was just a large set of furnaces that is supposed to have cast much of the iron for the Ironbridge. When you look at the remains of the furnaces now, it is easy to lose track of history. Everything around you is beautiful and the gorge is luxurious with foliage. The reality would have been a vision of hell. The painting Coalbrookdale by Night by Philip James de Loutherbourg shows as much, with the skies filled with smoke and the furnaces glowing with flames. We have successfully romanticised heavy industry and I’m curious as to how the nearby Blists Hill Victorian village would have made the time feel. In my head, it’s full of chirpy kids in flat caps running amok but I bet they’d have been consumptive urchins with flat caps, robbing you. I think I just invented the plot of Oliver Twist.

After Bedlam Furnaces, we crossed the river and found more remains of a mining site on the side of the gorge and then we followed a path that took us to a viewing point up many steps. A family came down from the hill with one of the children counting how many steps they’d taken and they were up to nearly a thousand. Oh what larks! About a thousand steps later, we get to the top and are finally rewarded with a view that stretches out for what looks like miles of countryside, woods and village. The walk down is far less steep and arduous, but offers more sensational views of Ironbridge and beyond. It was truly wonderful.

I have always found the last day of a holiday to be my favourite. You get one last little trip and a chance to make the most of what time you have before you head home, in a high state of grief. The walk around Ironbridge and up in the hills is a great goodbye. And there we have it, the West Midlands Odyssey is over. The region is criminally underrated, the people have excellent accents and there is beauty in these towns that makes me want to go back for more.

A trip to…Ludlow. A West Midlands summer, part 2

Ludlow is the second location for our West Midlands holiday. It takes two trains to get from Ledbury to Ludlow, but it’s worth it as Ludlow is a wonderful town. We changed trains at Hereford which felt like an apocalyptic hellscape, with people patrolling the platforms for mask avoiders and a general feel of subdued terror. It felt very different to London. The Transport for Wales trains have big signs on almost every seat imploring you to not sit there and the announcements thanked all the key workers (my pleasure, guys) – it didn’t feel like August, but April. When we arrived in Ludlow, we head to The Feathers to check-in but are told to go far away until 2pm and that our bags cannot be handled because of covid. I get it, it’s fine. But the reception staff really seemed to take a little too much joy in flinging us out into the gutter.

Laden with bags, we trudge down the hill to Ludlow Brewery for a drink. The stuff they serve is excellent and all the staff are friendly, but the atmosphere is bleak. A baby is being fed milk in a windy, concrete garden. The old train shed that the brewery is in has no soundproofing so everything sounds eerie. Back at the hotel, the person behind reception manages to find us a room, but seems initially confused that we’re two men sharing a bed. She regains composure and asks if we want the standard queen room. Wink wink. I inform her we’ll take it, but we’re so much more than standard queens. The Feather is in a stunning building but beyond the façade of the building, most of the hotel is more recent and our room is nice, in a fairly generic way.

Beautiful streets full of charming buildings

Ludlow is a fine-looking town but suffers from what so many ancient towns do; by covering up the gorgeous medieval buildings with plate glass windows and plastic signs, the town loses some of its lustre. A giant Natwest sign definitely lacked the olde-worlde vibes I was after. When I become Prime Minister, this will be tackled in my manifesto, as will walking slowly and putting your feet up on train seats. I did wonder if towns like Ludlow take the gorgeous architecture they have for granted. Near the Buttermarket there is a row of what appear to be Tudor buildings, but the date 1871 carved into the wood suggests otherwise. One of the buildings has a charming overhanging first floor and it’s just a great view, but it could be so much more if it weren’t for the terrible embellishments of the now – massive posters for sales and such tawdry baubles.

After a stroll around Ludlow town centre, we go into Ludlow Castle for £8 and get to enjoy some expansive views over the town and beyond from one of the towers. Every tower has a queue snaking outside it, so only groups at the castle together can go up at any one time. The benefit of this is that you get to take in the view without a kid screaming at full tilt next to you, but you have to wait an age to get to the view, what with the kids screaming up in the tower. The parents exit the tower looking distraught.

The castle is, you know, a castle. I always leave a castle wondering why I entered in the first place. Usually, I am paying to see a few information boards that say “Lord Geoff lived here, and he loved curtains” as I look at a pile of old rocks in front of me. But it adds some heft to the town and the walk by the river is glorious. We follow a route called Whitcliffe and Breadwalk. It’s called the bread walk due to the builders being paid in bread so they didn’t just get drunk all the time. How very puritanical! As we approach Dinham bridge, the view becomes one that is a reminder of just how picturesque England can be. The bridge, dating from 1823, is a simple but elegant one that features stone arches. When you stand on the bridge, you can look right and admire the weir, the small islands in the river, the old buildings that line the riverfront and the castle high up above everything. The view is made all the better by the summertime explosion of nature. The opposite side of the river is composed of a wall of trees and wonderful paths to explore. If you follow the Breadwalk route from Dinham bridge to Ludford bridge, you will reach a point where you look across and see all of Ludlow from a vantage point that is picture perfect.

In the evening, we had a big meal planned for our anniversary. The biggest meal, in fact. We went to Mortimer’s for their tasting menu which is composed of about 610 courses of food. It’s a charming venue and when you’re inside you feel totally closed off from the world outside. The best restaurants feel to me like I imagine how a Casino is. You don’t know if it’s day or night and time disappears. Though, at a good restaurant, everyone is a winner.We eat in a room that appears to be built into rock, and it’s a small dining room so every utterance like “Oh my GODDDDD” is heard by all around. The staff are magnificent in their speed and efficiency. Proceedings kick off with olives and a cocktail before we’re bought some starters. Little bites of joy. The hand dived scallop is superb and is swiftly followed by duck in three ways. There’s pressed duck, pastrami and duck liver. I steer clear of the offal but the rest is a revelation of how different duck can taste. The part of the meal I had a bit of difficulty with was the sea trout which is served raw with crab and a smattering of fish eggs on top. The more I ate the more I enjoyed; and to put this in perspective, I can’t recall eating raw fish before. The trout was so delicate with a sharp citrus twist that I found myself enjoying it more with every bite. Following this was Hereford beef, baby leeks and roast shallot which had a delicious depth to it, showing that the chef can seemingly do anything in the kitchen. The variety of food was magnificent.

After all of this, two puddings came. The best pudding was this magnificent beast that featured a scoop of sorbet with a disc of meringue daintily balanced on top. We were entirely full and I considered if it would be necessary to call a cab to take us the 100 metres to the hotel when a small box of further treats was bought out of macarons, fudge and a chocolate. It felt a bit overwhelming and perhaps even masochistic of them to feed us more, but we ate them all. Everything was tip top and it easily slots into one of the most memorable meals I’ve experienced.

The next morning, still full of all the food from the night before, we met some friends from London who were also on a staycation. They drove us to Croft Castle and parkland, about half an hour from Ludlow. While the castle itself was closed for covid reasons, the 1500 acres of parkland more than made up for this. The walled gardens turned an overcast day into a kaleidoscope of colour and smells. Plants such as the spiky blue thing on a stick, the things you put under your chin to see if you like butter, daisies for making chains and the one that looks like a cool skyscraper (purple acanthus) are a delight to coo over. The gardens are expansive and really relaxing to stroll through.

We follow the purple route, the Highwood walk, and as soon as we walked past a recently deceased lamb, we enter a field full of ancient trees with great views over the countryside. I spot one particular tree, a Spanish Chestnut, that I want to photograph more closely and I notice a plaque at the base which says that the Queen herself thought this was an absolutely top tree and added it to the list of Great British Trees. This was all done for the Golden Jubilee in 2002 and it’s hard to imagine one of those Spanish trees, coming over here and stealing our soil, would be granted the same accolade today.

The scenery here is wonderful, and the National Trust have done some excellent work at opening up some views but also working towards planting more native trees to recreate a woodland that would have been recognisable to people with top hats and monocles. A great part of the walk is when you start to descend into a valley surrounded by conifers, cutting you off from the world before the fishpool comes into view. After some time walking by the side of the water, we see a grotto which is held together by forces of which I do not know and then the Gothic Pump House. The pump house is over 200 years old and from the outside, looks somewhat like a spooky church that once piped spring water up to the castle. The pump house no longer works and now if you want spring water, you’ll need to get yourselves to a shop.

After the castle, we have some time to kill so visit Leominster for a brief nose around. It’s a perfectly fine town with some delightful old buildings but the only life-changing thing I can recall was Roy’s Café which proudly advertised dairy burgers with an illustration of some burger version of Rainbow’s Zippy. Quite intriguing and terrifying. Needless to say, this being a small town outside London, there was bunting everywhere, which I always feel gives off a quasi-nationalist groove. I don’t know what it is, but bunting at a wedding is fine, yet when strung across a town it just feels a bit Farage for me. After the brief delights of Leominster, we drove for lunch at The Riverside at Aymestrey which was a beautiful pub in the middle of glorious countryside. It was the kind of pub that feels more like a special occasion venue than a local but the service, food and atmosphere were all great. There was a focus on local produce, with wild herbs from the Lugg valley, vegetables from local farms and lots of meat from the region. As an added bonus, there were plenty of good dogs, so it was essentially faultless.

Back in Ludlow, we took another stroll around the town. We had a look at the Broadgate which is the sole surviving medieval gate in the town, with the Wheatsheaf Inn growing out the side of the walls. The pub is cosy but they had some loopy covid restrictions. There was tape on the floor but no plastic screen around the bar so the lady behind the bar was relaxed until you stepped a millimetre over the red tape. People entered the pub one way and exited via the door at the far end of the bar. However, if there is an influx of customers, this system falls apart and causes a blockage of people trying to walk past all the people at the bar. Managing the situation looked like a bear trying to spin plates, which are on fire.

Ludlow is a gem of a town, even in covid-land. It has managed to maintain a lot of charm and character, thanks in part to the town being an economic backwater as the wool trade lost importance in the 19^th century. As a consequence, the town didn’t go through a period of demolition and reconstruction and today there are over 500 listed buildings in Ludlow. I would struggle to think of another English town that has quite such a density of historical buildings. I would also struggle to think of many other towns that left me feeling as content as Ludlow.

A trip to…Ledbury. A West Midlands summer, part 1.

Had 2020 been a normal year, I would have gone on a summer holiday to Germany for the third time. The trip would have been following the route of the Romantic Road, through places like Würzburg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber and Dinkelsbühl, places which sound wholesome and cute. As we all know, 2020 has been a little bit tricky, so instead the decision was made at Holiday HQ to travel through the West Midlands. You read that right, the West Midlands. I am from that part of the world but have never thought to spend time there for leisure.

Lonely Planet describes the region as having “green valleys, chocolate-box villages of wonky black-and-white timbered houses” and the promise was delivered and then some. The countryside we saw was soothing, verdant, with hints of a wilder edge in the Malvern Hills. We visited Ledbury, Leominster, Ludlow and Ironbridge and every destination had timber-framed buildings a plenty, inviting pubs, a local approach to food and usually a castle within spitting distance. “Please stop spitting at the castles” is the region’s catchphrase.

It was quite novel having a holiday 90 minutes from where my family live, so I took the opportunity to invite Mum to spend the day in Ledbury with us. We hadn’t seen each other since the very day the lockdown was announced back in March. In Ledbury, we stay at The Feathers. The building dates back to 1565 and is a perfect example of the architecture of the time. It creaks and crackles with most stairs lurching pleasingly to a slope that makes you feel drunk while sober and sober when drunk. In our room, the floor went down into a corner and I sort of found myself falling towards it no matter what I did. The bathroom looks fresh out of the 1980s and the framed pictures in the bedroom have seen better decades but for £45 a night, the hotel is far nicer than the price would suggest. The restaurant and coffee house all retain a lot of the features that make the building memorable, but the coffee house’s blue light around the ceiling is less than fitting.

It’s a pity to report that the Sunday roast at The Feathers is average because to me, a roast is a high stakes meal and should leave you in no fit state to do anything but rub your belly and groan in a happy way. Instead, I was merely quite full and while nothing was wrong with the food, it lacked character. For £18.50, I would have expected more. My Mum did say her crumble was excellent, and the iced coffees are good, so it’s not a disaster. In a welcome twist, breakfast the next morning was genuinely good.

Ledbury is all centred around the market house and up the set-piece medieval Church Lane which is marvellously photogenic from any angle. On the street you have Butcher’s Row House museum and at the top of the lane stands St Michael and All Angels church, which has existed there in some form since the 11^th century. After our stroll around the town and it being August, a Sunday and in the covid-era, we wandered what we could do, so we went to the riverside park. After all the beautiful buildings of Ledbury, it was a pleasure to get to the park via an industrial estate which featured some stunning tin roofs. It’s quite the historical tour of industrial buildings of the last 50 years and is not to be missed, unless you’ve anything else at all to do. The park is a thin sliver of land between the river Leadon and a main road but there are some reasonably diverting sights such as a tree that clings onto the river bank, showing you the roots spreading out alarmingly. Beyond the riverside park you can head out into open country that looks gorgeous with cows roaming about. We spotted Sixteen Ridges vineyard in the distance, but it was closed.

In the evening, we went for a second walk and headed out to Ledbury Park, but it turned out that this was private so we kept finding gates telling us to go elsewhere. It’s bit of a downer because there’s so much nice land in Ledbury but finding a path you can walk on takes longer than it should. So we trudge back to town, find another private path and eventually find a space we can wander around, which is an almost vertical climb so we abandon that as well. Finally, past the Police station we find a path that takes us through some fields abuzz with bees and we end up in Dog Hill Wood where we spot someone looking out over the town all alone. It always seems to me that anyone sitting alone on a viewpoint must be a murderer, but we didn’t see any legs sticking out of the undergrowth.

After this somewhat distorted walk we go to the highly atmospheric Prince of Wales pub on Church Street. They’d gone covid-mad and every single table had plastic screens that separated people apart from each other but not separating us from strangers. I had seen these sort of screens splitting people up in Italy but Italians quickly figured out that this was ridiculous and scrapped it. We, like everyone else in the pub, discreetly slipped the screen out of the way as talking through a plastic screen is rubbish and we supped our very nice German beer in a semi-anxious state. They didn’t bother with track and trace and had a system where you ordered your drink and signed your signature with a pen other people had used. I guess we’d spritzed our hands with hand gel but still, great pub, shame about the inconsistencies. And if a breakout happens there, I’ll never know.

Day two in Ledbury marked day one of Eat out To Help Out so we went for a taxpayer-subsidised breakfast at Cameron and Swan, which sounds like the setup to a political joke, but in Cameron’s case it was a pig. And the first thing to note is that this is a place that does track and trace very well. Perspex separates different groups of customers, with hand sanitiser on entry and someone to take your details. If you wanted to go to the loo, you had to put your hand up so you’re not confronted with the horror of bumping into another human. I had the full English, which is most of anyone’s daily calorific needs, but it was kept very healthy by the half tomato and beans. Why do cafes feel the need to only put half a tomato on a place? Would an entire tomato ruin appetites? When I was in a hotel in Warsaw, I noticed that room service breakfast charged the equivalent of 50p for half a tomato. The mind boggles. My partner had some sort of salmon concoction and was very pleased. Gold star!

After the meal we had a stroll in the walled garden by Church Street and it was blissfully calm and quiet. I could have sat there for days. I was excited to visit Hus and Hem, a Scandinavian design shop which for reasons unknown thought that Ledbury was the place to sell their delightful goods. I bought a friend some chocolate covered liquorice (Salmiaki) before we headed to the only museum open in the town. The painted room is a small, er, painted room and when renovating the building in the 1990s, a decorator stripped away some wallpaper to find some unexpected marks on the walls. It turns out that they had come across a 500 year old painting that was hidden under hundreds of years of renovations. The design was that of a knot garden and it is simply remarkable that the painting is still so bright today, with easily readable extracts from the bible. The guide was super, miming along to a covid-friendly audio recording of her talk, and she was dressed in suitable attire, hiding her face mask under a lacy veil. There was something very 2020 about this visit; usually, I wouldn’t find much of a thrill in somewhere like the painted room but being able to go back into a museum was still something to be savoured. And really, it is remarkable that people in the Tudor times were painting on a wall I was standing in 500 years later, taking photos on my digital devices.

After a good lunch at the Seven Stars, we set off on a walk to Eastnor, despite Eastnor Castle being closed. We head to Coneygree wood, on the edge of Ledbury and we experience that great moment of the traffic sounds being entirely muffled by the trees. Soon all we hear is our feet crunching on the ground and the birds gossiping about us in the trees. The woods felt ancient, with vines creeping up everything they could and before long we were walking through open fields ringed by the enchanting trees and great views of the Malvern hills. After about 45 minutes, we come across a settlement of pheasants rummaging about, making alarmed noises and having fun with their friends. When we arrive in Eastnor, we see the Church covered in scaffold and not much else. A look for another route back via the fields was essential as the fine folk at Google only suggest routes that would have us as flat as roadkill if we misjudge the traffic on the roads. Luckily, there’s another route that takes us in a loop back to Ledbury, via fields of sleeping sheep that brings us out near Dog Hill wood.

In the evening we have dinner at the Olive Tree restaurant. Our original plan of eating at a Thai/Chinese restaurant is scuppered by them only doing takeaway. The only person inside was a very stressed out looking woman wondering where everyone was. Luckily, the Olive Tree had one table left inside, where people usually wait for takeaway. On this table we were able to hear the presumed owner bemoan his full restaurant, saying Eat out to Help out was a disaster. I couldn’t sympathise. He was making money and we got to eat two mains with drinks for £20. While I thought my hake risotto was great, the menu was so absurdly long, it made me wonder why restaurants don’t just do a simpler range of things excellently. But I don’t run a restaurant, so what do I know.

My adventures in Ledbury end here. It’s a fine town, with much to commend it. I had moments of real pleasure and relaxation but the closures from coronavirus definitely made this a less compelling visit than it could have been. Had we hired a car, the Malvern hills would have been ours for the taking. Next time maybe, but my trip continues to beautiful Ludlow.

A trip to Arcachon and Saint-Émilion

A compelling reason to visit Bordeaux is that it is in a perfect location for day trips. The two places we visited were Arcachon Bay and the village of Saint-Émilion but I was far more excited about visiting Arcachon Bay, to see the Dunes of Pilat. These are Europe’s highest sand dunes and while the internet provided me many photos of how impressive the dunes would be, seeing it for real is quite something else.

We take a train from Bordeaux Saint-Jean station to Arcachon and from there, a bus to the dunes. The bus journey is the exact opposite of my experience of France, in that it was €1 each way and I was momentarily stunned to realise how cheap it was. As a result, I was incapable of inserting the paper ticket into the ticket machine and looked like I’d never been on a bus before. On arrival at the bus stop by the dunes, there are some gift shops and cafes, before you take a short walk through the woods, which let you know you’re getting closer to the dunes by the increasing levels of sand around your feet. The dunes themselves remain hidden until the last moment when they come into view as if by magic. They are enormous and intimidating. I have never experienced anything like them.

The dunes are busy moving between 1 and 5 metres inland every year, and it’s possible to imagine the joy of moving to such a beautiful area and home on the Avenue des Dunes, only for the dream to turn to a nightmare as your living room starts to resemble a beach. The dunes are 500 metres wide, three kilometres in length and over 107m in height. It is roughly as tall as the spire of Milan Cathedral – having walked up to the roof of that cathedral, I can assure you that the height is not insignificant. Similarly, getting to the top of the dunes is not an easy thing to do, as you swiftly come to realise that the peak seems to always be further away, so you climb some more, look out and see there’s another peak just beyond it. Eventually, with ragged breath, you will get a view that just doesn’t seem possible in Europe. In one direction is Banc d’Arguin, a sand bank that you can visit by boat or ferry and beyond is Cape Ferret. Look another way and you’ll see the dunes spread out in a thin line of sand reaching to the horizon and behind that is an uninterrupted expanse of woodland. It’s a rare sight that looks close to nature and it’s wonderful to see that France has not overdeveloped this beautiful landscape.

On the dunes, I had one of those very fleeting moments of complete calm where my brain felt empty of worries and concern. It’s a beautiful moment. Perhaps it was the ability to stand atop the dunes and be confronted by the vastness of the landscape with soothing sights in every direction. It’s a view that makes you want to explore for days. Overhead, many hang-gliders are taking in the view in their terrifying contraptions.

The town of Arcachon, which abuts the dunes, is pleasant in a seaside way, but as with Bordeaux, the streets all look impeccably clean and paving looks like it was laid for our arrival. The spend on infrastructure and making France look divine must be eye-watering but the results are worth every centime. In the past, Arcachon was where sick people were taken from the city to “take the air” and look out at the sea. Arcachon is split into four parts, each according to the season. The Summer town is closest to the sea and contains the bulk of bars, restaurants and attractions. When we visited, the Summer town beach was mostly empty and the walk up the pier was a pleasant and relaxed affair, proving that I only really enjoy beaches out of season. Separating the Summer and Winter towns is Parc Mauresque which is well maintained and peaceful. If you’re a fan of heights, head up the Observatoire Sainte-Cécile which wobbles as you ascend it, which made me feel fairly terrified. The views from the top are worth the terror, though. You get views of the sea and the Ville d’Hiver (Winter Town) neighbourhood. This neighbourhood has a very peculiar estate of houses that all look like they’re haunted. The hundreds of luxurious villas are all slightly different but any one of them would make a great set for a Tim Burton film.

As this is February, not much is open so we find a remarkably characterless bar, one that has those cliché pictures of Paris in black and white on the walls. Next time I go to Paris, I will see if Parisian cafes have pictures of Arcachon on the walls, or just more pictures of Paris and that damned Chat Noir. The men playing a game in the corner seemed happy enough and I was transfixed by the lady serving us drinks, who had a pair of glasses that were on a chain and purposefully broke in the middle. What a place! To round off our day, we went to La Table du Boucher where a three course meal and wine came in at under €30. The options are written on chalk menus and the sea bass was excellent. Relaxed as we were, we entirely forgot to check train times to Bordeaux, with the last one of the day being a mad dash away. Arcachon was nice, but it wasn’t nice enough to warrant an emergency hotel stay.

The weather saved the sand dunes and Archachon, but it wasn’t playing nicely for our trip to Saint-Émilion where the grey skies matched the grey buildings. Despite this, Saint-Émilion is a great village to have a meander around the medieval wonders. There’s Europe’s largest monolithic church there, built into the rocks. There are also caves and ancient buildings to explore. It is clear from the moment you get to the village that this is an important place for wine; the land is almost entirely taken up by vineyards and chateau. When you arrive in the town, a large proportion of the shops are wine-related. As we’re flying back on Ryanair who are petrified of anything weighing their craft down, all the goodies are entirely wasted on me.

We have limited time in Saint-Émilion as we need to catch our flight, but we manage to stroll around the village, taking a lot of photos and we find the time to have lunch at Chai Pascal, which was one of the few places open. The interior has a lot of warm stone and feels immediately cosy. We were in luck as this is a wonderful restaurant with vaguely gruff service along the lines of “sit there, wait, eat, go” but the food was good enough to warrant this. I ate an incredibly rich confit of duck which came with greens and roast potatoes. The saltiness of the dish worked wonders with the fat from the duck, and I drank a small glass of local wine that cost €9 because my finger apparently hovered over that and not the €6 wine. This was a blessing in disguise as the wine was sensational, one of the best reds I have ever tasted. The tiny measure of wine goes against guzzling it down, but it was worth it. This was a wonderful end to a wonderful trip. I was deeply content.

Until…I forgot that Ryanair boarding passes need to be downloaded within two hours of the flight. Upon the realisation that I had no boarding pass and the app was not letting me conjure one, I had to run around the airport terminals looking for a human. When I located a human, I had to grovel to the people and staff arguing at the baggage desk, promise them a blood oath I wasn’t dropping off luggage and get a boarding pass for €50. The person behind the baggage desk didn’t really get that my flight was imminent and languidly printed out the blessed boarding pass to freedom. For a brief moment I contemplated that the worst outcome would be spending another night in gorgeous, enchanting Bordeaux, but it wouldn’t have been as fun without my friend so I ran at Bolt-like speeds to get through security and back home. From blissfully relaxed to horribly stressed, this trip had it all!

A trip to…Bordeaux

For a £25 return flight to Bordeaux on Ryanair, what did I expect? The budget terminal at Bordeaux airport shares DNA with a lean-to at your Aunt’s, but not quite as nice. Nobody is at the passport desk and when they deign to arrive, the man doesn’t even glance at me to check I am who I say I am. A half hour shuttle bus later and we arrive at the city’s main train station which is a thing of beauty, announcing you are somewhere that deserves your attention. Smart trams whiz us to the centre in a sleek and stylish way and when we arrive, I am a little overcome with envy of the populace of Bordeaux. It is a seriously gorgeous city, with the buildings glowing in a warm honey colour in the afternoon sun, while at the same time the UK is being whipped into a froth by Storm Dennis. We’re staying at Hotel Konti, and it’s brilliantly located, right by the luxury stores I couldn’t afford to visit and it was a reasonable price too. Research conducted once I’d gotten back to the UK suggests that a 3 night stay in June, had 2020 been a normal year, would have been triple the cost.

But fear not, the room isn’t ready, and when it is, we try out our bedside lamps and one of each pair is malfunctioning so at least there’s symmetry at play. Add to that, the twin beds were fused together to make a double bed so we trudge down to the lobby to ask them to turn the double back into twin beds. This takes 20 minutes but the hotel lobby has a ‘cosy corner’ where we are able to have mini cakes and coffee from the terrifying and hostile coffee machine. The machine growls, gurgles and then spits out something hotter than lava roughly into a cup. I know these are reasonably minor quibbles, but when I arrive at a hotel, I always want to have a quick shower and to write “I will not fly Ryanair” 20 times as penance. Despite my moany tone, I’d stay at Hotel Konti again without a doubt.

When we head out into the city, we walk in the direction of the medieval St Pierre district to visit the Phillippe Stark designed Mama Shelter and the rooftop bar. We’re gravely told that the rooftop is full, even on a Sunday night, so we walk about admiring the city while trying to locate ground-level drinks. Like moths drawn to a light, we find ourselves outside what is perhaps the cosiest bar in France, La Comtesse. It’s a sublime space, with ramshackle chairs just on the edge of collapse and with every light covered by a lampshade. The junk shop vibe was exactly what I wanted and the ice-cold beers were the glacé cherry on the cake. If I lived in Bordeaux, this would be by local, even if I lived far out. The only other bar I have found in France that competes with the level of cosiness is Le Cercle Rouge, in Angers. Any bar playing vinyl of Portishead and The Rolling Stones is going to score high with me.

Dinner at Au Bistrot was a major success, even if the initial welcome was a strange one. Half an hour after the restaurant was scheduled to open, the doors were locked and the staff seemed faintly surprised to see us. They take us inside to what looks like a stock room filled with boxes of wine doubling up as a restaurant, but soon, the open kitchen comes alive with flames from vigorous pan action, something I am far too scared to achieve at home. If I could slow-cook a stir fry, I would. The menu initially appears to offer much in the way of offal, and I refuse to end up retching in a public space over tripe again. Luckily, pork loin which Google translates as the less yummy backbone of pig came with tender vegetables and a warming peppery sauce. The saucisson with brioche that my friend had was also outstanding. The secret weapon was that the brioche soaked up the rich gravy, creating a heavenly texture. The wine was far too drinkable, which explains the stock room vibe – when it’s this good, people are going to want lots of it. For a nightcap, we went to Frida, bursting with fairy lights, where I was presented with a tropical cocktail in a Tiki mug. I find Tiki mugs to be among the least subtle of containers, the exact thing James Bond instinctively knows to avoid. My cocktail drinking experiences are more Rosa-Klebb-by-the-sea, but I’m a sucker for a cocktail with a bit of dried pineapple in it.

We ended the night walking through more gorgeous streets, the very streets that inspired Baron Haussmann’s remodelling of Paris and the streets that Alain Juppe wanted to be rescued from the blight of pollution and heavy traffic. It is remarkable to think that Bordeaux was, not so long ago, a dirty city, the buildings encrusted with grime and clogged up roads. Where the Miroir d’eau now enchants visitors, stood a giant car park scarring a vista that longed to be seen. It has been a phenomenal change for the better and in some ways it feels like Bordeaux has been reborn.

It’s a slightly strange thing that so many places in Bordeaux are closed on both Sunday and Monday, at a stroke killing off a weekend mini-break if you were so foolish to visit on the same days I visited. As a result, our breakfast options were limited and anywhere that looked cosy or inviting laughed us onto the drizzly street. Eventually we stumble across Kokoma, and have a deeply traditional French brunch of pancakes, bacon and eggs. I was fine with this as the food was great. Kokoma is staffed only by people with beanie hats that don’t cover the ears (an affectation too far in my books) and a young girl in a Kangol hat just waiting for Samuel L Jackson to come up and share fashion tips. Lonely Planet would call it “achingly hip”. After filling up with Le pancakes, we eventually find ourselves in the Bourse to admire the Miroir d’eau, only to find it is turned off and the Bourse is only half visible due to scaffolding and Brad Pitt’s massive face advertising a bank. It’s a little disappointing that a city would do this to us, so we go to find a bar where we’re ignored for ten minutes.

One site that is open on a Monday is the City of Wine. Bordeaux is wine country and the region has an incredible 14,000 producers and 400 wholesale dealers. The UK makes 15 million bottles of wine a year versus 8 billion in France so there’s a lot of history here and a lot of money. The building itself looks somewhat like a decanter and shimmers from afar. It cost €80m to construct and so charges a premium price of €20 for entry. Despite the price tag, it’s the most detailed wine experience I could imagine and as you progress through the building, you’ll be shown a lot of interactive videos about wine from around the world, including Georgian, German and Argentinian wine. The videos are genuinely interesting and you soon realise that people plant vines in the most unfriendly terrain, but still they succeed even if it’d be easier to do almost anything else. Even countries like Pakistan and Canada have a wine-making culture.

Watching videos of people enjoying wine responsibly is all well and good, but where were the videos of tourists picking a fight with a mirror? They really missed a trick there. I hope they follow my advice of creating an escape room experience for hen and stag do’s. Everyone gets locked in a wine cellar and to escape, they need to down a bottle each. It could be the museum’s set-piece.

One of my favourite parts of the museum was the smelling stations where you squeeze a pump and a scent associated with wine comes out. There were smells for all sorts of things, from pears, tobacco, liquorice, peppers and even faeces. A sweet dungy aftertaste, goes down well with a beef wellington. You could call it the Jilly Goolden section. When you have learned all you can about wine before museum fatigue sets in, which takes a couple of hours, you head to the top floor for a glass of wine from countries like China, Portugal, Italy or France. We chose a local glass and looked out over the 360-degree views of the city. Just popping its Nazi head out was the submarine base built in World War 2 where the Germans beat Ken Adams in creating a terrifying bunker set. It is 245 metres in length, 162 metres in width and is 9 metres thick. It recently opened as a light and sound show of the work of Gustav Klimt.

For dinner that evening we initially had numerous options until we realised most were closed, but my friend struck gold with Loco by Jem’s. It’s in the part of Bordeaux that comes after the glorious architectural wonder of the centre, so it’s concrete chic. We arrive to an entirely empty restaurant until a bunch of Brits come in. I am immediately suspicious of all Brits these days and worry we could have made a terrible mistake. If they sing the praises of Boris Johnson, I feel my only reasonable response would be to flip tables at them.

The food at Loco was something of a revelation as far as tasting menus go even though the restaurant has some strange ideas about how we’d like our food presented. Bread and butter arrives, but the bread is placed daintily on some twigs, even though the twigs are placed daintily on a plate. Why twigs? Who ever thought this was an idea worth pursuing? Why not lob some bread in a coffee cup they found in a bin? How about soup in an old can of Dulux? I’m sure that’s happened. For €41, we had an amouse-bouche, two entrees, a main and pudding. The main was sea bass adorned with a few slivers of smoked eel. Having never eaten eel before, my fussy side wanted to fling it out a window, but my experimentation paid off and it turns out that eel is far tastier than I could have imagined. The pudding came in numerous components, part brownie, part ice cream, part giant biscuit which all mashed together was very good. The service was friendly, attentive and casual, the Brits weren’t lovers of the Prime Minister in a bad wig and we left feeling satisfied, despite the slightly bizarre twig thing. I can live with that if the food leaves you feeling happy inside.

Despite visiting Bordeaux in February, a terrible time of year, when much is closed or opens when it feels like it, I’d advise anybody to go. It’s a stunning city that is a genuine pleasure to walk around and explore. The food is of a high standard and if you find yourself with nothing to eat, the cream puffs at Dunes Blanches Chez Pascal will keep you not just alive, but in a state of rapture. Or you could just visit when everything is open. No matter what, you won’t be disappointed.

Island hopping in Greece

After a few days in Athens, we drove to Naflipo, in the Peloponnese region of Greece. After driving through some reasonably nice landscapes, though ones devoid of ooh’s and ahhh’s, we start to see the Greece that travellers coo about. One minute it’s olive groves as far as the eye can see, then a hill starts to resemble a mountain and views become more like a greatest hits package. Everyone in the car starts staring out the windows left and right so as not to miss anything. Familiar names crop up like Corinth (ancient history town), Kineta (the first film by Yorgos Lanthimos), Olympia (all the sports) Argos (famed for its catalogues) and in heading to Nafplio I find out that it was the capital of the First Hellenic Republic and Kingdom of Greece until 1834. It has a population of just 34,000 today but still has an air of elegance and status about it.

We stayed at Pension Marianna, which is outstanding. As soon as we arrived, we felt welcome and were given some orange juice and are told our rooms were ready. A bugbear I have is arriving at hotels and finding that some unforeseen disaster has befallen my room such as moth attack, exploding lamp or an unforeseen and aggressive haunting, so it’s such a delight when all is smooth. The room was cosy and as we were perched at the top of the town, we had windows that opened out onto a magnificent view below, stretching out into the bay. The Marianna somehow under-promises and overdelivers from its excellent location to the quality of the breakfast.

Just above the hotel, you can walk to the Akronauplía castle ruins, where some parts of the wall date back 5000 years. History feels like a part of the fabric of Greece but until I found out that the walls were this old, I just looked at them and thought “these are nice walls” as I gazed out into the sea. From the viewpoint, I was able to see the curve of the bay and the Argolic Gulf, a view so peaceful I went there every morning to watch the few people in the sea as well as some fishermen and I urged myself to visit the sea more in England, something I have magnificently failed at doing.

When I first ventured into the town, it was a treat of marble pavements, wall-to-wall bougainvillea (the only plant I seem to be able to identify) and cats lounging stylishly. Entirely delightful streets full of things I didn’t need to buy stretched out everywhere but I spotted Mediterraneo wine and deli that had everything I wanted; a place to sit, read my book and have a glass of wine. A holiday read in a relaxing spot is the best kind of read, one where you don’t have to quickly feel you need to do anything but turn pages once in a while. Michel Faber’s Under the Skin might not appear to be a great holiday read but it’s worth a shot. It’s not too long, it’s deeply immersive and has a pace that makes you want to read more. Plus, the book features British weather and I had escaped all that.

Later, when my friends came down from the hotel, we took a long walk along the seafront, stopping every now to sniff the sewage and then to take photos and marvel at the quality of the light that may well have been organised by a cinematographer. It all felt a little unreal. Over the water, a castle perched on a rock and beyond that, hills caught the last gasp of the sun, with an army of wind turbines doing their thing. We headed back to Mediterraneo for a bottle of wine before dinner and after this, pleasantly fuzzy in the head, we walk to a couple of restaurants, who all politely laugh at our entreaties to be fed.

Hunger growing, we walk around the town some more and have a drink at the Aiolos Tavern’s Wine Bar before we are seated. What follows is an absolutely enormous meal of anything and everything at Aiolos Tavern. We were hungry, but the sheer quantity of food was ludicrous. That said, it was excellent and when you find a restaurant with a great atmosphere, it feels totally fine to just eat endlessly and laugh a bit too loudly. The orange cake was good enough that we visited the following day to get some more. Even typing orange cake gets me thinking about how much I want more of this. Somehow, after all the food expanded our stomachs and ripped our clothes like we’d become the Hulk, everyone wanted ice cream, so just like children, the ice cream part of the stomach was activated.

As we were in Greece, an island day was required so we drove from Nafplio to Ermioni, via a route that in some will produce terror and in others awe. A turning on a gentle corner quickly became a scene from a Bond film where he’s chasing someone and they end up in a ravine, on fire. Luckily, we arrive in Ermioni without anyone catching us. From there, we take a floating lawnmower disguised as a boat to Spetses, an island that can’t help but charm with its houses built very recently for Instagram. On some of the new estates, you could see influencers knocking chunks of the new homes with a sledgehammer, all for the vintage vibe. The vistas were engineered for hashtags. It is like arriving on an island designed for lifestyles lived online, with yet more glorious sunlight adding even more to the beauty.

As easy as it is to forget it’s a real place, people do live here and their bright white houses are perfectly set against the deep, luscious blue of the sea. We stop for an iced coffee at Balkoni, with views out to the water where I write a few smug “hahaha, you’re not here and I am” postcards to friends back home. Inevitably, I never found a stamp and these postcards ended up being sent when I was back in the UK. I may be one of the last people sending postcards, and even I’m doing it badly.

Caffeinated, we head from the centre towards a church on a peninsula and we walk past small beaches, clear water and fishing boats that lie dormant. On the island you can sense the season is drawing to a close; bars are closed or open for brief parts of the day. The warmth is very deceptive; it’s nearly 30c so you expect that sitting on a terrace for a beer will be a remarkably easy feat but it’s not. It’s nearly November and instead of enjoying the weather, we should be panicking a little. To put the weather into context, if this were the UK, shops would be filled with Christmas trinkets yet here I was applying sunscreen.

We only had three hours on Spetses so could just about scratch the surface of the island. There are woods that beckon in the hills, coves to explore but we simply don’t have time so we loop back towards the centre of town via a parliament of cats, getting down to the serious business of hanging around on benches. Just before we board the ferry for the next island, we pass a fairly grand old building in some state of disrepair with a notice board out front advertising their events. One was a 30^th anniversary workshop for Aston University. In three years of university, I never had a lecture or meeting off campus, let alone on a beautiful Greek island.

One thing I’ll always remember about Spetses that is both fascinating and terrifying is the endless streams of grannies whizzing by on scooters. They were always at a pace and nothing had a chance to get in their way. In the moment, I felt very much that I wanted to be a pensioner on a scooter later in life. They looked so mind-bendingly happy.

Hydra was our second island and it’s perhaps more beautiful than Spetses, but the differences are slight. For one, it’s less wooded but the upside of this is that there are more unobstructed views to be had. The island is entirely free of cars, which gives it a different pace and we didn’t have to duck and cover every few minutes. Donkeys, with BMW and Peugeot badges are the only form of transport on the island other than your own legs. We have five hours in Hydra but even so, we don’t get far from the main town but we do pass Leonard Cohen’s house which he bought when he was 26. Impressively, none of us realise at the time but Google timeline reliably informs me that I took a photo outside it. Naturally, I was taking photos of yet more cats.

According to Google, these cats are outside Leonard Cohen’s house. I think otherwise.

We need feeding, and it’s late afternoon on a Greek island in October. Google maps tells us that a few places are open, when they clearly are not. We go to a restaurant that has glowing reviews, knock on the door just in case and a startled topless man comes to tell us they’re definitely closed. After a while we do the activity that exists only when on holiday and lacking choices; we get picky. Anywhere will do, but not the place with the tables that look horrible, and certainly not the place with the ugly door. Eventually, miraculously, we find a place that only has one flaw. Flies. Herds of flies that are everywhere. We peer at the food, which looks delicious, and we try to look beyond the flies nesting on every piece of it. When lunch is bought over, new flies divebomb us and our arms flail enough to create a cooling draught for the customers next to us.

Post-lunch and fly larvae, we stroll along the cliffs and take in the views, accompanied by big contented sighs. Some of the trees on the path were bent at angles that suggest fierce storms and above us we spotted a few stone windmills. Some of these are barely recognisable as windmills while others are now used as accommodation and look gorgeous. As we amble towards a bar, we pass Leonard Cohen’s bench which this time is noticed by us. It’s not so much a bench as a three sided stone wall with a plaque, but with a view that would lighten the mood of any Cohen fan.

We spend the rest of our time in Hydra near the harbour, where I try and paddle in the water but find myself unable to trust the slippery look of the stones leading to the ladder. So instead I continue to look out on the water before we have a drink at Spilia café and bar and here, my mind wanders. Why is the sea so calm so often? How come water flows quite evenly and doesn’t jut out of the sea at random angles or arrange itself in a vertical tower of water? How come gravity doesn’t stop? Why didn’t I do well in my GCSE Science? This goes on for what seems an eternity and is a sign that I’m relaxed enough for my mind to start rearranging the world. We face the sea, looking at the sun slowly dipping down for another night and I’m glad water wasn’t doing anything untoward because, for one, it’d ruin the view.

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