A Kind of Magic

Anyone who reads this blog will know by now that I have many, many obsessions, from wild swimming to Lovejoy to overnight trains to Monty Python. One of my minor obsessions started in 1992, when the theme song used for the TV coverage of the Barcelona Olympics was Montserrat Caballe and Freddie Mercury’s glorious, mesmerising, flamboyant performance of Barcelona, which Mercury wrote as part of a wider collaboration with the opera singer. At aged 10 and destined (I then thought) to become a singer (I later chickened out of a degree at the Royal Academy of Music in favour of the safer option of an English degree, but that’s another story) I watched the two of them, resplendent and full of joy, and thought: “WOW!”

To this day this remains one of my favourite performances, though of course it didn’t actually originate at those games – the video was from 1987, and Mercury had died, from AIDS, a year before those Olympics, mid-way through recording what became Queen’s last album, Made in Heaven, which was finally completed and released in 1995.

*It’s easy to see why Mercury fell in love with Montreux*

Even if you’re not a die-hard Queen fan you might well recognise the album cover – Mercury, immortalised in bronze, defiant, celebratory, looking out over Lake Geneva from the Montreux shore. I’ve wanted to see it for nearly 30 years, then finally, last week, I did.

Montreux is only an hour’s train journey from Geneva, so is either an easy daytrip if Geneva is your base (as it was for us) or an easy final destination, with efficient and comfortable double-decker trains running from Geneva Airport at least once an hour at prices that pleasingly buck the trend in an otherwise eye-wateringly expensive country. In July it hosts a huge international jazz festival, and in December the largest Christmas market in Switzerland. For the rest of the year it’s a playground for the rich and famous, Lake Geneva’s answer to Monte Carlo (a fact very much reflected in the prices of its hotels and restaurants, and one reason we chose instead to stay in Geneva.)

*At the entrance to the Queen exhibition, Montreux*

Freddie Mercury is at the heart of Montreux’s tourist industry, and they are both protective and proud of their adopted son. Mercury loved Montreux and spoke highly of it, and it’s possible that without the solace it provided, given how desperately ill he was in 1991, the album I consider to be Queen’s finest would never have been made. A free, small museum where the studio stood, within a casino complex, is almost a place of pilgrimage for Queen fans, featuring many artefacts from Mercury’s outrageous costumes to handwritten lyrics, instruments and more. It’s a superb museum, and well worth a visit.

We visited on a bitterly cold and relentlessly wet day of persistent sleet trying to decide if it wanted to be snow or just unpleasantly cold rain, arguably showcasing Montreux at its worst. Tourists and locals from nearby towns such as Lausanne plodded purposefully towards the Christmas markets, where they got in one another’s way and then displayed mutual impatience. We found the statue in the midst of this, staring eternally over the lake. It seemed amusing and apt, somehow, that I was unable to get the clear shot from the album cover, because, directly in front of the statue, someone had erected a giant wire reindeer bedecked in twinkling Christmas lights, so gaudily incongruous that I like to think Freddie would have approved.

I would like to come back to Montreux in the summer to indulge my other great passion – swimming. Even in 0-degree temperatures, we did see one brave soul in the water, and I momentarily regretted not having brought my swimwear.

But, for the time being, this was another bucket list item ticked off, a sincere and heartfelt pilgrimage in search of a man who, in the face of what must have been immense pain, not to mention anxiety at the pervasive stigma around AIDS at the time, nonetheless declared: “It’s a beautiful day! The sun is shining! I feel good. And no-one’s gonna stop me now.”

We are so blessed that no-one did.

I went to the Center Parcs Hotel so you don’t have to

Ahh, Center Parcs, that reassuringly expensive middle-class Utopia for those who want to holiday close to home but consider themselves too sophisticated for Butlins. If you’re not familiar with Center Parcs, it’s what you’d get if you combined the Sylvanian Families with the Parent Trap, then threw in a healthy dose of extreme capitalism. Its basic “lodges”, nestling in a small piece of forest conveniently close to a major motorway in an attempt to give it an air of rugged isolation without causing inconvenience, retail at an eye-watering £1999 for just four nights for a family of up to four, and that’s before you’ve paid for any food or activities, the vast majority of which cost extra and seem to be modelled on an American summer camp. For that price you could buy a 7-night all-inclusive trip to Barbados, and as I stood in a rainy carpark in Woburn on a Friday evening in October, I wondered why on earth you’d choose the latter.

I should add that we hadn’t (give you’re no doubt thinking: well, you’re about to write about it, so what were YOU doing there?) We were hangers-on at a family holiday, and we weren’t actually staying in a “woodland lodge” with them, but in Woburn Forest’s daring break from tradition: its “hotel“, boldly advertised as the perfect place for a “romantic getaway”.

*Frank, preparing for romance on our balcony*

And if your idea of a romantic getaway is staying in a generic hotel just off the M1 that looks like it came flatpacked from IKEA then you’d be in luck. It’s true that you don’t need to worry about being disturbed as you get amorous, because they don’t service the rooms. This means that, in reality, the hotel room is a compact and more cost-effective version of the lodges, but stripped of useful things like any means to eat or wash up, let alone actually cook. The emphasis in Center Parcs is very much on self-catering, with a limited choice of generic restaurants, and as everything costs extra we planned to get breakfast in its much-hyped “Parc Market“, which turned out to be a Co-Op with some additional branding. We bought croissants (which seemed apt given the resort’s insistence to spell “Park” incorrectly, as though that cheeky “c” gives it a sort of added refinement), which were fresh and flaky, but with no crockery at all in the room we ended up eating them off the saucers, which I then rinsed off, slightly tipsy, in the bathroom sink when we stumbled in later and realised they didn’t clean the rooms there.

Given we’d booked a hotel, it doesn’t seem unreasonable not to provide crockery, except that there were other things there to indicate they did expect you – to a certain extent – to indulge from within your room. There was an empty but not unspacious fridge, suggesting they fully expected you to purchase things to put in it, and two large wine glasses, implying that if you were two fully-grown adults holed up in a hotel in Center Parcs you’d obviously want to get obliterated at the earliest opportunity. And so, not wanting to disappoint, we bought a bottle of Viognier and a plastic tray of disappointing tapas and sat at our tiny table listening to the rain lash at our wooden balcony. Then we diligently rinsed out our wine glasses and went to bed.

*Getting ready for the High Ropes, which, while expensive, was genuinely amazing*

I’m being mean, of course. Nobody comes to Center Parcs for the tapas. No, they come for the pool, or rather the “subtropical swimming paradise“, as it’s somewhat optimistically called. This is the one activity that is actually included in the cost of your break, so if you really, really like waterslides and wave machines then that could just be £2k well spent. Sadly, some of the more enjoyable activities from days gone by (including a slide we used to call the Wall of Death, where you plummeted at breakneck speed down a steep slope of water) have been closed for spurious health and safety reasons, such as people frequently emerging from the experience with fewer teeth than they had when they started. But there are still some great slides to choose from, the best being the Tropical Cyclone, where four people sit in a giant rubber ring before hurtling into an abyss, and the Wild Water Rapids, which I remember fondly from childhood, but which should, more accurately, be called the Mild Water Rapids.

By far the highlight, though, was the impromptu show to which we were treated one afternoon, where the pool was suddenly cleared for “emergency cleaning”. We then watched as one of the lifeguards (we can only assume he’d lost a bet, or was the newest recruit to the group) was dispatched with a large net into the centre of the pool, where he stood, waist high, retrieving what we assumed was a rogue turd. The others then took water samples, and a while later came back and announced that the wave machine would now be “tested”. The warning was presumably to stop everyone flocking to the pool the minute they heard the loud Tarzan cry, which alerts visitors to the impending excitement of fake waves. in this instance, it signalled instead a unique form of cleaning, where presumably whatever stray, foreign objects were in the water would be washed towards the drains. We didn’t go in the pool again.

We did have a wonderful time – we paid extra to do a high ropes course that was fun and active and challenging, we rode bikes everywhere and emerged unscathed, we went bowling, and we played charades for hours with our group of 18 – not something you can do in your average hotel room. We then drove back into London, got up and went to work the following morning, jetlag-free. In that sense, I guess, it’s better than Barbados.

Magical Mystery Tour

Liverpool has something of a mythic status in our family. My parents lived and worked there for several years, and my dad has ever since been full of tales of paying people to drive your car into the Albert Dock so you could claim on the insurance, of returning to a multi-storey to find someone mid-way through removing the third wheel of your car, only to meekly put it back when you ask nicely, of neighbours rallying around to help in times of crisis (of which Liverpool has experienced many). Liverpool was the place we went to see the pantomime, even though Manchester was nearer, because the audience was funnier than the cast. It’s probably the only UK city outside of London where I would ever consider living.

And so I was excited to take a group of my students – primarily Jews from the refined suburbs north of Boston – to my favourite UK city. Excited, but also a little nervous that those John Lennon glasses had become a little too rose-tinted over the years. Fortunately, the city didn’t just live up to expectations – it exceeded them many times over.

If you’re looking for a city break in the UK, Liverpool should be high up your list. Its selection of free museums is unparalleled outside of London, with a Maritime Museum and Slavery Museum as well as the Tate Liverpool and several general museums looking at the history of Liverpool and its place in the world.

Of course, many people come to Liverpool for one thing and one thing only, and Liverpool doesn’t exactly keep quiet about it. From our hostel on Matthew Street we could see a beauty salon called Hey Jude, an independent Beatles museum (not to be confused with the Beatles Story), the Beatles Shop, and a huge sign declaring we were in the BIRTHPLACE OF THE BEATLES. The Beatles Story, while not free, is a glorious, joyous homage to the Fab Four, their rise to fame, and their separate post-breakup stories, complete with genuine artefacts and scene-setting rooms that take you from one era to the next. For me, though, it was the post-Beatle focus on John and George (my favourite, if only for the Python connection.)

Architecture isn’t necessarily something one thinks about when one thinks about Liverpool, but perhaps it should be. The docks – controversially no longer a world heritage site after the city had the audacity to make them actually useful for the people who lived there – reminded me of Hamburg, and I can imagine the Beatles were able to feel relatively at home there. Like many UK cities – partly courtesy of the Luftwaffe – Liverpool is an eclectic mix of old and new buildings whose stark difference complements one another to great effect. But my favourite building by far is Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral. I grant it isn’t to everyone’s taste (a friend, on seeing a picture I posted on Facebook, was near-apoplectic at what he views as a sacrilegious eyesore), but I love the community feel of its circular interior, and the deep purples and blues of its stained glass. As we were there on a Sunday I was able to attend Mass there, along with two of my students. Perhaps part of my love for the building is knowing its place in the history of Liverpool, a city which could easily have slipped into sectarianism, but didn’t when the two faiths chose to unite rather than divide under the leadership of Derek Worlock and David Shepherd.

Lying in my hostel unable to sleep while hundreds of people in the bar opposite belted out Dancing Queen and danced the Macarena, it was hard to believe this was a city Thatcher (boo, hiss) once earmarked for “managed decline”. Perhaps that didn’t work because, as Worlock and Shepherd proved, and as the Beatles sang, the city has always Come Together, in the shadow of tragedies from economic ruin to the Hillsborough Disaster. This year, it hosted the Eurovision Song Contest. The city – bolshy and brash and as ever – is giving Thatcher the proverbial finger still, as a delighted American stood wide-eyed in the middle of Matthew Street and declared “This city is FREAKING AWESOME.”

In Dublin’s Fair City

Dublin is probably the city I know best outside the UK, yet every time I visit I find a new surprise – a plaque to one of the city’s countless famous writers that I hadn’t known about before; an excellent Greek, Italian or Spanish restaurant nestled unobtrusively between traditional pubs; a previously-undiscovered swimming spot tantalisingly close to the city centre by public transport, making the Irish sea much more attractive than it looks from the plane or (God forbid) the ferry.

Yet it was with complicated feelings that I left Ireland this summer, because I had been there not for pleasure (though, as it turned out, pleasures were abundant) but for work, because our campus there found itself understaffed. And this is emotional because I am one of an estimated 80 million people around the world who can claim – however tenuously – to be part of the Irish diaspora. Our families left Ireland over a period of centuries – indeed, some are still leaving now – with numbers peaking during the potato famine in the mid 19th century, and again around the early part of the 20th century. In one ten year period, it’s estimated 30% of the island’s under-30s left, in search of a better life, better opportunities and better wages. My family were among them, moving to Bradford when the textiles industry was at its height. Many, many more crossed the Atlantic – the film “Brooklyn” (from Colm Toibim’s book of the same name) depicts sensitively and painfully the transition from a dark, old world to a bright new one full of possibility – and this is why so many Americans – from Kennedy to Biden – invoke their (increasingly distant) Irishness at every given opportunity. According to the EPIC Museum (of which more later), Ireland has the dubious distinction of being the most emigrated nation on earth.

*Dublin’s Memorial to the Potato Famine*

And so it was that, just over 100 years after my family left Ireland because there was no work, I was back, because there was too much of it.

Visiting as I was to help 50 Americans – many of whom fall into the a study abroad group known as “heritage seekers” – settle into three-month study abroad programmes in Dublin and beyond, reminders of this poignant truth were everywhere, both in the students who came and the things we did together.

The bittersweet nature of Irish emigration is most sharply and beautifully presented in EPIC – while many cities, from New York to Melbourne, have museums of Immigration, presenting a selective history of a welcoming nation in a self-congratulatory pat on the back that often whitewashes a reality of quotas and entry tests, Dublin’s museum is instead a homage to Emigration. EPIC is a museum that simultaneously mourns whole generations lost to other countries while celebrating their profound impact on those countries’ cultures and histories. While a friend scathingly dismissed the museum for “not having any actual stuff in it” (it consists of a series of multimedia displays and a disappointing lack of any artefacts, though there are many opportunities where these would enhance the content) it nonetheless presents a powerful picture of a complex nation, reducing the visitor to tears in one room and smiles of joy in the next. From black and white film footage that shows the old waving farewell to the young as a ship pulls away from the pier, you are next transported into the heart of Brooklyn’s dance halls, where Irish culture thrived and grew and influenced the wider culture around it. To emphasise this, the final room shows, on a big screen, the fateful interval entertainment at the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest, when Irish-Americans Michael Flatley and Jean Butler unleashed Riverdance on the world.

As a musician with a genuine Irish fiddle (an heirloom from my great-grandfather) I have been obsessed with the rhythms of Riverdance for almost 30 years, and couldn’t believe my luck that an anniversary version of the show was just finishing its run at the glorious Gaity theatre. Even in relatively modest surroundings (the intimate Gaity can’t compete with the vast Eurovision arena) the music was unbelievable – joyous, manic, prodigious, infectious – and the symmetry of many pairs of feet working in perfect unison transfixing. I was worried that it would somehow be a disappointment, but it was anything but.

For such a tiny nation, there’s no doubt that its influence on the world – from both those who left and those that stayed – has been disproportionate. The city is filled with reminders of famous residents, from James Joyce to Oscar Wilde. Yet Ireland is also no longer shying away from the darker sides of its history – EPIC mentioned that many emigrated due to prejudice, particularly against gay people or unmarried mothers, and Dublin’s last Magdalene Laundry – institutions brought to public attention by the currently-showing BBC Drama The Woman In the Wall, and before that by the film The Magdalene Sisters – is being turned into a permanent memorial to the women and children who suffered abuse behind its walls while the government – at best – turned a blind eye.

Recent work visits have allowed me to explore the Dublin beyond the raucous, garish pubs of Temple Bar and the unnecessarily generously-endowed statue of Molly Malone, heading out of the city on its wonderful DART line (Dublin isn’t a city that springs to mind when you think of public transport, and yet the DART facilitates a smooth and stunningly beautiful commute into the city from Howth in the north and Bray in the south). A mere half hour from the city you can find the seaside suburb of Sandycove, with its famous Forty Foot (yes, of course I did) – a set of steps down into the famously tempestuous (and, even in the middle of summer, impressively cold) Irish sea.

So, when I boarded the (delayed, of course; I have never arrived in or left Dublin on time) plane home, it was with regret (as well as guilt that I could have such an incredible and – humour me here because I know it sounds cheesy – profound time here while I was working). Over the week, I realised that I would move back in a heartbeat should the right opportunity arise. I would love to live in this vibrant, diverse (the EU has brought immigration in its most positive forms to a nation more famous for people leaving than arriving), beautiful, humorous, warm city, a shining, beating, cheering, toe-tapping heart of a nation that got knocked down, then got up again. And again. And again.

What’s the Story in Tobermory?

I’ve lived in the UK all my life, and while I have actually lived in Guernsey – one of the Channel Islands, and so far south there are actually bits of France that are further north than it is – I’ve never ventured to any of its northern isles. A brief trip to Oban gave us the perfect opportunity to rectify this, and by breakfast on our second day in Scotland’s Highlands we were on a ferry bound for Mull.

While there are lots of things to see on Mull and beyond (it’s just a short ferry ride from there to Iona) doing them relies on an extremely scarce and erratic bus service that leaves its various locations at irregular intervals that are not always helpful to visitors, and presumably not to locals either – I understand now why foot passengers on the ferry seemed as rare as condoms in a nunnery, most having opted to bring their cars. Our 9:20 arrival ruled out Iona, one of only three buses a day having left at 8:30 and a second not leaving until 13:30. So, instead, we opted to visit Tobermory, or Balamory, as it’s better known to a generation of children. To ensure this was a sensible plan we asked in the Visitor Centre how we might get there, receiving a sharp, no-nonsense response: “you’ll have to get the bus, unless you want to walk” (it’s 12 miles). As we were leaving, an American tourist was asking “So, we’re here! What is there to do?” only to receive a highly enunciated and baffled reply “Do in WHAT sense exactly?”

Buses to Tobermory are far more regular, by which I mean they are roughly once every hour and a half. I say “roughly”, as nobody had accounted for the 30-minute delay due to resurfacing the roads, making a large portion of the route one-way. We made a mental note to take the earlier bus back so as not to risk missing the ferry, which turned out to be a wise decision.

If you’re on Mull and short on time, there’s a walk you can take through and out of Tobermory heading north along the coast that takes you to a lighthouse roughly 3 miles from where the bus drops you off. It’s a stunning walk, taking in a substantial stretch of rugged Scottish coastline, the sea, and the mountains of the mainland beyond it.

Tobermory itself has less to offer: there’s a tiny (free) local museum where all the descriptions are handwritten, giving it the feel of a school project from the 1980s, and a large sign telling people they are only welcome to write in the Visitors’ Book if they or members of their family were members of the local armed forces. There are the obligatory souvenir shops, a small distillery (again this seems obligatory in this region) and a slightly sad-looking aquarium. The village itself, though, is the main attractions – rows of brightly-painted houses beneath imposing cliffs with well-worn fishing boats sleeping on the shores. It also has some excellent restaurants – I’d highly recommend the Galleon, with its fishy take on Mac and Cheese, which is basically mac and cheese with huge hunks of lobster thrown on top.

One word of advice: there is nothing to do – except potentially argue with the woman in the Visitor Centre – on Craignure. It is not so much a port as a pier in front of a small coffee shop, which seems to open only when the ferries arrive and operates with the same speed an reliability as Mull’s bus service (though we did have an excellent slice of rocky road). The beaches are pebbly and nobody was swimming, and what at first looks like a pretty pedestrian path quickly runs out and becomes a pavement-less A-road.

Perhaps beyond expectations we made it back first to Craignure, and then on the ferry back to the mainland, as scheduled. I should also mention that the ferry alone is worth the trip – it’s a sheltered route so very smooth, and with excellent views. Just, if you have one, bring a car or a bike.

All Abroad the Caledonian Sleeper

There are a lot of sleeper trains on my bucket list – the Ghan in Australia, The California Zephyr, and that one that runs all the way from Cape Town to Dar Es Salaam – but these require a) a lot of time and b) a lot of money, neither of which I have. So, until I win the lottery and retire, we settled for the Caledonian Sleeper, travelling from London Euston all the way to the end of the line in Fort William.

*Arancini on the “traditional Scottish” menu. I was confused too.*

There are various options on the Sleeper, from standard seats and the option of a (at an extra cost) sausage roll for breakfast, right up to the coveted double rooms – there are only three of these on each train, and they sell out almost as soon as they are released for sale, especially during the holiday season. We went for the next best thing: a Club Twin. “Club” means the same on the Sleeper as it does on many airlines: you pay a lot extra and are rewarded with a few perks, in this case, an en suite loo and a cold shower you can take while perched awkwardly on aforementioned loo. You also get access to the “Club Car”, meaning you have a choice of a far more extensive menu, if eating a three-course meal after 10pm is your thing. Alternatively, you can order room service, which involved folding down a tiny table with one person sitting on the bed and the other person sitting on what is quickly proving its worth as a multi-purpose toilet/seat. With dining En Salle de Bain feeling unappealing, we went to the Club Car and washed down an incredibly tender piece of pork with a pleasant Malbec.

The sleeping experience was better than expected – the beds, while narrow, are extremely comfortable, with soft, cosy duvets and a firm mattress. The only downside was the ladder from the top bunk, which was screwed in and positioned right in the centre, meaning you had to be a contortionist in order to curl yourself into the bottom bunk. This meant that each time you get up to go to the loo you also have a brief, impromptu yoga session.

What the Caledonian Sleeper lacks that Amtrak supplies (in place, one assumes, of regular trains that run approximately to schedule) is a viewing car. The views from Glasgow onwards are stunning, but the dining car is always full (we asked the attendant if we could loiter after breakfast and look at the view in the empty bar seats, and were given an unequivocal No) so you have to sit on the bed – if there are two of you, this means sitting either side of the ladder and craning your neck towards the window. Sadly, you can’t even sit on the loo this time, as it’s positioned too far in its little cubby hole to see.

As an experience, I loved the Sleeper. It was an efficient way to get somewhere without wasting any holiday time, as you were travelling over a time you’d be sleeping anyway. The dinner was fine, but in future it makes more sense both in terms of time (10pm is late to eat dinner, unless you’re Spanish) and money (dinner is extra, even in Club). Breakfast is fine, though, although the coffee appears to be rationed, and a request for more will be met with a curt refusal.

A postscript: we flew back on account of this being both quicker and cheaper. It turned out to take almost as long: a three hour train to Glasgow, the obligatory two hours in the airport, a further two hours of delay, then, to top off the experience, an extra 20 minutes sat on the runway after the following disconcerting announcement: “um, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve just discovered we’re missing a vital piece of equipment and are unable to leave without it. The ground staff have run off to find it and we’re hoping to be on the move shortly.” All those of us who grew up in the 90s suspected it was the left phalange, only to discover the plane didn’t even have a phalange.

Looking for Lovejoy

I was both a lonely child, and an odd one. My dad, not content with just buying a Harley and growing his hair long like any normal man suffering a midlife crisis, instead bought a pub more than 200 miles away and upped sticks, leaving his already sibling-less daughter looking for even more imaginative ways to occupy her time. I’d already learned all the capitals of the world, then all the capitals AND largest cities of every US state (like I said, lonely and odd), so at 12 I developed a (possibly unhealthy) obsession with the eccentric Suffolk-based comedy drama Lovejoy, and an even unhealthier obsession with its star, a pre-Deadwood – but still old (the same age as my pint-pulling father, in fact) – Ian McShane.

And when I say obsession, that isn’t an exaggeration. I laboriously taped every episode onto VHS, writing “LOVEJOY! DO NOT TOUCH!” in smudgy, scrawly fountain pen on the labels. To demonstrate my commitment to the cause, I even taught myself how to read hallmarks, spent all my pocket money accumulating a collection of antique toast racks, and told my teachers that when I grew up I wanted to be an auctioneer. (The careers test we all took at 14 respectfully disagreed, suggesting I become a teacher, librarian or housing officer.) A programme about a cast of eccentric loners who didn’t quite belong anywhere, lived off their wits and liked pretty, old things appealed to both my sense of isolation and exaggerated opinion of my own abilities.

While I did not become an auctioneer (or indeed a housing officer), I did nonetheless, years later, become the resident nerd on a podcast about Lovejoy (with Em supplying both the technical and editing skills, Helen supplying the intellect and order, and all of us supplying the copious quantities of alcohol that went into making it.) For the second time in my life, Lovejoy gave me something of a purpose, as we raised money through the podcast during lockdown – selling memorabilia, running an online quiz, and finally running a half marathon – to raise money for Royal Trinity Hospice where Dudley Sutton (Tinker in the show) spent his final months.

Then, this weekend, I finally got to visit some of the sites that were featured in the series that dominated my early teenage years.

In my favourite episode – The Lost Colony – Charlotte – a delicious Caroline Langrishe whom I was completely unable to emulate with my dyspraxic clumsiness and general lack of poise – glided effortlessly into Lovejoy’s prison cell and reflected “we’re an awfully long way from Lavenham, aren’t we?” A fun fact, which I discovered many years later, was that although Lavenham was the ostensible setting for the programme, and featured sporadically, not least providing many of the backdrops and occasional trips to the Swan Inn (where Lovejoy would take his various female acquaintances, usually just before much drama/hilarity ensued), the more famous locations were a few miles south. The glorious Felsham Hall is actually Belchamp Hall in Belchamp Walter, and the church where Charlotte and Lovejoy didn’t get married (sorry – spoiler – but you’ve had almost 30 years to watch it) is St Mary the Virgin next door, which could have come straight out of a Lovejoy episode itself, with faded murals dating back to the 14th Century.

*The past is a foreign country, and Lovejoy doesn’t live there any more*

Seeing Belchamp Hall in 2023 looking exactly the same as it did when Lovejoy drove out of the gates for that final time in 1994 declaring “the past is a foreign country, and Lovejoy doesn’t live there any more” made me momentarily emotional (or, as Lovejoy would protest, “I’ve got wine on my shirt). As for Lavenham, it’s every bit as gorgeous as it looked as the apt backdrop for the intrigue and peril that lay beneath the programme’s sleepy surface.

I ended my mini-pilgrimage in Cambridge, rather like Beth did, at the Fitzwilliam Museum, admiring on the way the colleges that featured occasionally, usually as a result of Charlotte pulling on her university connections.

I felt a huge nostalgia seeing these locations that were so central to my life for so long, and could almost see myself buying a little cottage somewhere there, and maybe discovering some priceless antique hidden there. Maybe I’m about to have a midlife crisis of my own.

Romancing the Stone

There is a generation of people my age and a little older for whom the name Cartagena conjures up images of a young and deliciously attractive Michael Douglas embracing Kathleen Turner’s big-haired, luggageless romance novelist Joan Wilder while Danny DeVito pops up at inopportune moments to wreak havoc as the film’s Archetypal-Yet-Somehow-Loveable-Baddie (implausibly called Ralph.) For this reason alone I’ve always fancied going there, so it was perhaps inevitable that the first time I set foot on South American soil it would be to visit Cartagena.

Before everyone shouts at me, yes, I know the movie itself was actually shot in Mexico due to Colombia being a bit, you know, cocainey. However, the skyline of the Old City will still send little shivers of nostalgic joy down the spine of every child of the 70s who remembers the film’s almost constant presence back in the days when we only had four TV channels.

Of course, there is a lot more to Cartagena than an early 80s adventure romp. A Spanish colony from the 1500s, Cartagena has been (amongst other things) the largest slave-receiving port on continental South America, a centre for the Inquisition, and the site of several battles between the Spanish and the English who, like a spoilt child perpetually miffed that they ruled a mere third of the earth’s surface, periodically went to bits they didn’t rule and broke them. Nowadays it’s a booming city – one of the largest in Colombia and seen as the tamer, safer destination in a country still famed for its drug barons and cocaine hippos (yes, really). It’s packed with high-end hotels and quaint, colonial-style guesthouses, boasts glamourous beaches, cosy cafes (serving, of course, amazing Colombian coffee), emerald shops (the “stone” in the aforementioned film), and stunning architecture which earned it UNESCO World Heritage status. For those wanting a broader experience, tour groups venture into the nearby jungles (though they have missed a trick by not – yet – offering a Romancing the Stone-themed tour where you can hurtle down a mud-soaked hill or dodge crocodiles – maybe the risk assessment was too complicated).

If you have only a short time there – maybe you’re visiting the city as one stop on a bigger itinerary – I recommend exploring the Old Town, trying the coffee, ducking into some of the wonderful old churches, and fighting off the many street vendors who make DeVito’s bad guy look tame. This allowed me to eventually use my Spanish not to ask for the price of an underwhelming souvenir fridge magnet or ask for the location of the bano, but rather to snap, exasperated, at a young man who had spent several minutes thrusting sunglasses at me and ignoring my polite “no, gracias”, by pointing to the sunglasses I was wearing and saying, “QUE ES ESO?!!” Disappointingly he shrugged as if to say “oh, fair enough”, and went to stalk his next potential customer.

If possible, it’s also well worth hopping on a boat for a tour of the bay, from which you can really appreciate the skyline and the old and new contrast of the city.

So, in summary, Cartagena did not disappoint. And once they’ve rounded up all the cocaine hippos we might well return and venture a little further afield.

Hamburg: An Unexpected Journey

When we planned our trip to Hamburg, we were excited to finally be going back to mainland Europe – our first post-pandemic and post-Brexit visit. We were looking forward to diving back into Germany’s favourite Christmas market (something Hamburg has in abundance – it feels as though every spare inch of land has been commandeered to house those little wooden huts, filling the air with the scent of Gluhwein, bratwurst and donuts.) We were salivating at the thought of living on sausages and beer, and convincing ourselves that all the walking we would inevitably do would cancel out the calories.

What we did not expect was that, less than three weeks before our trip. I would be diagnosed with bowel cancer. We did not envisage exploring the Beatles’ old haunts and the Hanseatic waterfronts with an impending bowel resection hanging over us. I did not expect to be having to watch what I eat in a pre-Christmas environment where every corner was trying to lure me in with all manner of alcoholic and sweet treats, sticking instead to a strict low-residue diet that meant no beer, no fibre, no fun.

But at the same time, this is perhaps the reason this trip was so magical, so needed. It’s perhaps the reason I have come back from Hamburg convinced I want to move there, convinced I could brush up my German beyond an apologetic “ich spreche eine bishen Deutsche”, which would inevitably lead to responses in flawless English. I have come back resolved to return, to do more. To eat more.

*Hamburg’s Rathaus, with obligatory Christmas market*

I have wanted to visit Hamburg since my early teens, and my obsessive Beatles phase. More than twenty-five years later this is still part of the draw, along with a general love of European cities, and of Northern European cities in particular. Despite the long wait, it did not disappoint. This is not least because the good stereotypes about Germany are true – it is stoically efficient. Arriving at the airport sheepishly clutching new blue passports, we were through immigration in five minutes – about five times faster than it takes to get back into the UK. Trains to the Hauptbahnhof leave every ten minutes and cost a mere E3.50 and take half an hour, and once on board passengers sit obediently masked and ticketed, though nobody checks either.

We chose to stay in St Georg – the Kensington of Hamburg, a short walk from the old town, on the shores of Lake Alster. Unusually, we did not have a bucket list. A combination of world events and personal circumstances meant we felt fortunate simply to be here, and were content with walking the streets to see what we found. A friend recommended Miniatur Wunderland but sadly our lack of planning caught up with us here – without pre-booked tickets, the queue was two hours! Instead we roamed the Warehouse District – the largest in the world and suitably impressive despite Britain’s efforts to destroy it during World War Two (they managed to destroy about half, which has since been rebuilt, and thrown in a controversial concert hall for good measure that ran hugely over-budget and looks a incongruous and a bit like a spaceship from a bad sci-fi film, though apparently has a phenomenal acoustic, so, swings and roundabouts.)

*Warehouses, with spaceship concert hall in the background*

Despite The Husband’s protestations, we did also made a pilgrimage to the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s famous nightlife district where the Beatles cut their teeth (the clubs they played seem to have had a tendency to burn down, so sadly can’t be visited). They are commemorated by an underwhelming monument in what looks like a small carpark flanked by bars promising “TITS AND MORE!” (more?) and that looked especially sad on a Sunday morning, littered with the remnants of the previous night’s revelry. The Reeperbahn is infamous for its hedonism, its bars, its strictly x-rated entertainments – it even has a street where women are forbidden to enter because… well, I’ll leave that to your imagination – but on a cold December morning it at least had the grace to look a little ashamed, and concurrently make the likes of Blackpool and the Khao San Road look positively classy and conservative.

As though subconsciously trying to balance out the seediness, after our morning in St Pauli we spent the afternoon in the Kunsthalle, Hamburg’s huge, impressive art museum, which is extremely good value and has art ranging from medieval altarpieces right up to sometimes thoughtful, sometimes shocking, occasionally incomprehensible takes on the present day.

Finally, food is always a huge part of our holidays. After lots of research, we (by which I mean me) carefully selected two restaurants that came highly recommended: Das Dorf and VLET. I would unhesitatingly recommend both. While my unwelcome diet meant the usual rich meats one might associate with Germany (my husband grinned at me unapologetically as he drooled over ox cheeks and venison) it did mean I could eat fish, something this port city has in abundance. If anything, it meant I tried things I would not usually have opted for. Of the two, Das Dorf has the edge for amazing service, incredible food and unexpectedly the best Crème Brulee we’ve ever had, though VLET wins for its views.

And so we’re home again, revitalised, relaxed, and thinking about where we shall go once our current, unexpected journey is over.

Flying North for Summer (Part 3): Caribbean Blue

We were looking forward to Aruba most of all, and perhaps that’s why we were disappointed: whatever our expectations were, it failed in meeting them. Even the tour guide seemed hard-pushed to find anything of note to point out, so much so that the tour involved a stop at a “natural bridge” that had fallen into the sea, meaning it was now a natural hole in which lay a pile of rock. While the beaches were beautiful and the sand so fine it massaged your toes as it slipped effortlessly between them, the overwhelming sense was one of cold ostentation, the roads lined with gated expat homes and huge, faceless resorts bearing the names of major international chains – Marriott, Hyatt, Ritz-Carlton. The town was hot and crowded with the human contents of the three cruise ships in port that day, and even the iguanas sunning themselves on the edge of the harbour looked jaded.

Much more appealing was its lesser-known sibling island of Bonaire – a place I’m ashamed to admit I’d never even heard of until we booked the cruise. The B of the ABC islands (the C being Curacao), Bonaire is famous amongst the diving community but hardly anyone else. Surrounded by lethal coral beaches that are so sharp they cut your feet if you go in without protection, it doesn’t attract the sunseekers of its neighbour, and as such as unexpectedly peaceful and devastatingly beautiful. Its town is a calmer version of neighbouring Oranjestad, full of brightly-coloured buildings but devoid of the throngs of tourists and the hustlers that follow them.

Our third stop on our relentless southern Caribbean tour, having bypassed Curacao and glided within waving distance of Martinique, was St Lucia. This is somewhere I have always wanted to visit and, visually at least, it didn’t disappoint. Unfortunately our visit coincided with that of Prince Edward and, strangely enough, it turns out minor royals of former colonisers aren’t necessarily all that popular. I briefly flirted with the idea of pretending I was Canadian rather than be linked, however distantly, to this prince normally referred to as “…and the other one” by an accident of nationality.

St Lucia is another country associated with eye-wateringly expensive hotels and well-heeled tourists who tend not to venture far beyond them. It also has some of the most terrifying roads I’ve ever been driven on, making the whole experience a bit like a theme park ride with unexpectedly grand scenery. St Lucia also has poverty that we didn’t see elsewhere on our trip, one of the highest homicide rates in the Caribbean. While the island is so often associated with luxury, that luxury is locked away behind high-security gates and even literal “KEEP OUT: PRIVATE PROPERTY” signs and, as in the past, is the preserve of its modern-day colonial masters from Europe and the US.

The final stop before the Snowbirds could really say they were on the way home was Antigua. Notably more equitable than St Lucia in terms of living standards, and thankfully with considerably better roads, Antigua is a sparkling, quietly confident cornucopia of hidden coves, natural harbours and even rainforests, punctuated by (generally) tasteful manmade additions. St John’s, the capital, was completely closed, it being a Sunday, and seemed reassuringly boring and unnoteworthy. Antigua was also where our uneasy agreement whereby my husband can have consistently comfortable holidays momentarily broke down, because I somehow managed to persuade him to go ziplining through a rainforest. There is photographic evidence of both of us, but his facial expressions in every photo suggest that ziplining is a very serious business, whereas mine are the visual equivalent of shouting “WHEEEEEEEEE!!!!!”, which I’m pretty sure I did several times as I flailed inelegantly through the canopy.

tuesdayinbucharest

So many places, so little time – making the most of a wonderful world