The Earth belongs unto the Lord,

And all that it contains

Except the Kyles and the Western Isles

For they are all Macbrayne's

Caledonian Macbrayne ferries have been part of my life since I was 3 months old and first traveled on one to the island of Islay off the west coast of Scotland. I have been there for a few weeks of almost every summer since and far too many of those have blown away with the ever quicker passing years.In early days, we took the overnight sleeper train from Euston station in London to Glasgow Central - that involved bunk beds with red blankets, Nanny drinking medicinal brandy for travel sickness and tea for all of us with digestive biscuits brought by the conductor before a 7am arrival.  

After that a smart walk down the platform, porters and luggage in tow, and then, glory of glories, the Glasgow Central Hotel and breakfast in a dining room which seemed the summit of luxury as did any breakfast that started with with tomato juice, an improbable treat but much to my taste - there was orange or grapefruit too.  Then there was a solid breakfast menu of serious proportions; cereal or porridge; kippers; eggs; bacon; sausages, seldom to be recommended in Scotland in those days but who cared aged 5 or 6; fried bread; mushrooms; tomatoes; probably black pudding but we didn't favour that which probably meant Nanny didn't either; tea; toast; butter; honey, jam and marmalade; all in the perfect mini pots that we only otherwise found on the 4.30 tea time train from Paddington en route home Wiltshire after a day in London.  

I hadn't really thought about it but I suppose train travel in my childhood was still intended to be a vaguely luxurious experience and station hotels at major terminals most certainly aspired to grandeur in lashings of red plush and marble plated ladies loos. In later years the green carpeted lifts were used in a vain attempt to persuade my pekingese that they were grass where she could have a pee.  I was extremely worried about the state of her bladder since she refused to acknowledge Glasgow pavements as in any way lavatorially inviting - I don't think she was the first or the last, the lift attendant had a very knowing look in his eye as we traveled endlessly from top to bottom and up again and carpet shampoos or changes were probably a regular event.

After breakfast there was a far from grand trip on a very old, bone rattling train, with individual compartments and no passages, to Gouroch in the port of Glasgow on the Clyde.  Bracing air through the draughty windows gave us our first, breathtakingly exciting smell of the sea for that summer and we couldn't have cared less about the almost invariable rain drizzling down the window panes and misting the view.  At Gouroch we caught the first of the two ferries for Islay.  This one took us to East Loch Tarbert for transfer by road to our second vessel at West Loch Tarbert that would usually get us to Islay by tea time give or take the weather and the tides. The first ferry hardly stands in my mind at all beyond some of the passing scenery and especially the island of Bute in the Firth of Clyde where we used to stop sometimes to stay a few days with friends and where, I seem to remember, Nanny used regularly to take her corns to the the chiropodist in Rothesay who had a particularly good reputation.

There was a yearly debate over bus versus taxi travel from one Tarbert to the other during the overlong gap between the arrival of one boat and departure of the next which sometimes meant a brief sojourn in a Tarbert Hotel with little to recommend it or make it memorable beyond the pervasive seaside boarding house and school cloakroom smell of boiled cabbage and badly aired furnishings. Finally, with general relief, we embarked on the Lochiel, a ferry old enough to have been traveled on by my Father in his childhood and where a waiter called Hughie who everyone knew held sway in the dining room for a great number of years.  That dining room was something too, none of the self-service cafes of contemporary CalMac ferries, certainly not including the decorative effects of the most recently commissioned ship apostrophised as those of a Polish brothel.  This instead was a realm of calm service with long white tablecloths, properly laid tables, long white aprons over dark suits and food that appealed like mad to us but probably not to any more sophisticated palette and not to Nanny who expected a rough passage and sea sickness.  Inevitable scotch broth was usually followed by minced collops I think or possibly just scotch mince, maybe fish in some form and then pudding which I can't remember at all but must, one imagines, have included custard of which I am not overly fond.

We sat mostly on deck, my brother, Nanny and me,  in air that was very fresh indeed and only came inside if it was really pouring - we were never sick although plenty were when a stormy sea took hold.  Arrival in Islay was enlivened by the method of taking the cars on and off the ferry in huge nets, like hauls of fish from the hold, attached to cranes. In Nanny's day and carless ourselves we were met by Mr MacNeil in our resident landrover, his pride and polished joy, and finally home to the familiar whitewashed house with all its known delights to be rediscovered and enjoyed and my only fear, the faces that appeared at night in the shadows of blocked in bedroom fireplaces and kept me quaking in bed or riskily running down the passage to find Nanny and safety.

The Lochiel sank once in those years due to a drunken captain, a standard hazard in those parts I would think.  All passengers and crew survived and the ship was salvaged too but we worried a lot about the sheep who had been drowned on their way to mainland markets, and a handful of cattle too. Caledonian Macbrayne really does still hold the keys to exploration of the Western Isles with complicated hopscotch tickets to get you from one to another on quite a drawn out tour.  There are flights of course to some of the islands, certainly to Islay but they are not the way to travel with dogs, bikes, too many people, for they are, relative to distance, extremely expensive, or with a weight of supplies such as crates of wine, also otherwise particularly expensive on the islands where whisky otherwise rules.

These days we usually drive from the South to the Islay ferry, now just a single crossing from the port of Kennacraig, just beyond West Loch Tarbert.  That drive was once a major undertaking probably involving a night with friends on the way but now accomplished in a fairly easy 8 hours if motorways are clear.  This month we returned to the mainland from Islay for a short trip by car and more ferries that took us for a night on the island of Skye and then a meander up the extraordinarily beautiful coast of Wester Ross and back down through Invernesshire to return to Islay.  My photographs from the trip show rather more of the dark drama of this part of the world than the brightly shining days of the tourist brochures when photographers must sometimes wait for weeks to get that alluring sunny image.  Still we saw wild beauty to compare with anywhere in the world even with attendant showers and low cloud and all this an hour or two's drive from cosily tamed Invernesshire farmland and, given the size of the British Isles altogether, to the cities of the east coast of Scotland, to Inverness itself and to Glasgow, Edinburgh and all points south.  

We came to Skye on the ferry from Mallaig to stay with friends outside Portree, the village 'capital' of Skye, overlooking the sheltered harbour where summer sailors come in to moor for evenings or nights in dry land lodgings.  Driving up the coast we had already visited Arduaine Gardens, managed by the Scottish National Trust and, like so many Scottish, gardens, an extraordinary mix of the most esoteric rhododendrons and other spring flowering shrubs and bulbs, with the tropical looking palms and ferns that enjoy the relatively damp mild winters of this part of the world where the coastal air is warmed by the gulf stream.Of the various other gardens we visited on our travels, privately owned Attadale in Wester Ross probably won the charm stakes, not least because of the delightful small turreted house at its heart, a miniature fairy tale castle, its various woodland and garden walks with sculpture punctuations and its delectable walled kitchen garden with an an imbedded fernery under a naturally dripping cliff face.  Inverewe, a little further North is NTS owned again and has a spectacular site that curves round the shore of Loch Ewe where seals galore can be seen on the rocks and occasionally shyer sea otters.The garden mix here includes enormous trees, sequoias, redwoods and indigenous species and the most stunning quercus cerris argenteovariegata, an amazingly beautiful spreading oak with variegated leaves; plus a vast range of rhododendrons, acers and unknown flowering shrubs; water plants including great canopies of gunnera and a wide range of herbaceous plants from all over the world including the remarkable schefflera macrophylla from Vietnam.

In Scotland of course there are castles and we managed a range of those from mostly ruined Dunstaffnage on Loch Etive and completely ruined Urquhart Castle at Drumnadrochit on Loch Ness to Dunvegan on Skye, still inhabited by the Chiefs of the MacLeod clan and their magical Fairy Flag; Blair Castle, home of the Dukes of Atholl,  a white washed fairy tale castle full of stags heads, swords and other more desirable treasures, a lone piper pacing outside the front door; and then the ruins and remains of lesser and greater forts and tower houses on islands and promontories all the way up the coast including restored and inhabited Castle Stalker near Port Appin where an unusually good roadside cafe offers it up as a lunch time view.

On Skye, natural scenery outbids any man made structures for dramatic grandeur, the lowering Cuillin hills most of all if they show their heads at all through the clouds - a year or two ago my daughter sent me a photograph headed 'view of the Cuillins', it was completely black aside from a few raindrops on the camera lens.  Extraordinary geological manifestations in rocky outcrops and pleated cliffs formed from ancient lava falling steep to the sea, add to the mystery of this landscape and fit well with fairy flags and fairy glens, with all the hardships and sorrows of life in the highlands and islands throughout history and especially the horrors of the clearances that have been burnt into soil and memory.  Skye too means the romance of Bonnie Prince Charlie's escape and Flora MacDonald although there is not much of romance about the peculiarly stark and ugly Victorian celtic cross that marks her grave in Kilmuir Old Graveyard next to the Museum of Island Life with its rebuilt crofts and representations of 19th century village existence. 

We left Sky on the great curve of the Skye road bridge over Loch Alsh and on up through the hills and rocky lochs of Wester Ross, spending a night at Shieldaig where the Shieldaig Bar and Coastal Kitchen provide dinner of an astonishing standard in what appears to be an incredibly isolated village on the shore of Loch Shieldaig.  It makes use of the freshest local fish and has a proper wood fired pizza oven as well to add variety.  Fantastic service and altogether a great experience to add to a comfortable enough bed and breakfast stay just outside the village overlooking the loch and only unfortunately beset with the Scottish plague of midges on an evening with not a breath of wind and enough warm occasional drizzle just to encourage the biting further.

So onwards, North, East and South around the beautiful inlets, and inland lochs of Rosshire to flowered and manicured Beauly in Invernesshire  where the wonderful old tweed shop is run by staff who may well have been there for a hundred years themselves. After that the Loch Ness tourist trap where Urquhart Castle is well served by a visitor centre that tunnels under the main road and out through a huge shop, information area and cafe to a terrace overlooking the Loch and the Castle and west again to Invergarry.  Blair Castle was our last port of call, via the powerful commando memorial overlooking the hills where they originally trained at Lochaber,before the final drive back to the ferry again at Kennacraig.  It would be easy enough to be seduced into visiting potteries, art galleries, more open gardens, houses and castles, were you inclined to such things, all he way through the Highlands where artists of greater and lesser ability congregate and multiply remarkably.  We fell for a rather surprising chocolate museum and manufactory, supplying high quality chocolate of every variety to passing trade and presumably chocolate afficionados who are prepared to travel for their pleasure, but only bought one bar as a rather ungenerous present.  

Truth be told, the late Spring is really the time for Scottish tours when spring is at its best in the gardens and there is no reason why the weather should be worse than in the summer in this most unreliable of climates.  because it is there and so close, I have seldom traveled far on the Scottish mainland beyond the straightest line to stay in someone else's house.  The tourist trade has been busy this year and we met representatives of most European countries during a very short space of time. The ruins of Urquhart Castle reverberated with as much of a muddle of languages as the tower of Babel.  As usual we forget those pleasures that are nearest to home and anyway try to escape to warmer, drier parts of the world but there is no doubt that we miss out if we forget altogether to go and look at what is on our own doorstep.

No hope for spontaneous tourism but it's still special

It is hardly a chore to spend a long weekend in Florence and, at this time of year, the autumnal climate is at least clearly just that, rather than the early onset winter gloom we get in Britain to chime with ghouls and ghosts and ghastly trick and treaters at Halloween. It is still however, high season for tourism, especially other Italians on the Ognisanti holiday weekend and planning is unfortunately required to avoid the huge queues at all but the most obscure sites.  Restaurants are heaving although booking there at least does seem relatively easy by this late stage of a poverty stricken year and we ate deliciously, centrally, and if not cheaply due to seasonal wonders, the earthy corruption of white truffles most notably, certainly on local Tuscan treats. Paoli, in the Via del Tavolini, produced huge raw vegetable salads where the truffles were mandolined to drifts of papery slices matched with the thinnest discs of zucchini.  Il Pennello in the Via Dante produced garlic laden vongole in broth and a slightly less successful peposa, the long cooked and determinedly gristly beef stew that is the signature of of Impruneta, a village now almost overtaken by the city of Florence. The Osteria Caffe Italiano, almost next to glorious Vivoli’s, the ice cream dream of forever, in the Via Isole delle Stinche, provided such enormous cannon balls of the freshest buffalo mozzarella that it was almost impossible to eat anything else.

We did manage to see enough to fill our weekend more satisfactorily than standing in the longest ever lines waiting to see the wonders of the interior of Santa Croce. The Giotto frescoes, unlike many others always attributed to him seem not yet to have been debunked as his work.  As my daughter said, why not leave it alone even if the art history scholars of the past like Bernard Berenson did occasionally make some curious attributions that have well deserved their later questioning. The glorious Ghirlandaio frescoes in the Sassetti Chapel were conversely quite deserted by tourists, the church surrounded by ongoing roadworks that are presumably ruining the lives of the grand traders in the Via Tornabuoni, one of the grandest shopping streets in Florence. Like so many similar products of wealthy sponsors of the 14^th and 15^th centuries endowing churches with great works of art and securing, they anticipated, by their pious acts and pious images, their place amongst the blessed, chapels like this are almost too rich to take in during the usual brief visit and need either revisiting regularly or at least a pair of binoculars and lying on the floor to view delights towards the high arched ceiling. 

The Uffizzi gallery is of course quite out of the question for the impulsive unplanned tourist unless you enjoy queuing – you must book online well in advance.  Advice we had failed to take ourselves when visiting Arezzo to see the Piero della Francesca, Story of the True Cross in the Bacci Chapel of the church of San Francesco.  We were lucky only to have to wait a drinking, shopping hour and a half to get in amongst the holiday crowds.  These frescoes stick in my mind from first sight when I was 12 as some of the most extraordinary anywhere, not I suspect only for the luminescence of Piero’s painting, the light on the Emperor Constantine as he dreams his famous dream, but also for the romance of the story of St Helena and the true cross. Fairy story, apocryphal nonsense or anything you will, it is a delicious tale, told best by Evelyn Waugh who has Helena as the daughter of old King Cole – that merry old monarch. Here again there is too much to see at once, one can take only an impression in the time allowed for viewing and there is little space for lying on the floor but what an impression it is and how it stays in the mind’s eye. The solidly beautiful young woman in a green dress, Piero’s Mary Magdalen, crowded by the 18^th century tomb of Bishop Tarlati into a corner on the wall of the Duomo offers a closer view of his work, silvery light falling on the glass jar of ointment, the individual strands of her loosed hair falling over the shoulders of her cloak.

On from Arezzo and more off the beaten track into the Tuscan hills and Tuscan industrial areas these days too.  First the little hill town of Monterchi, for a sight only of the supreme serenity of the Madonna del Parto, Piero’s pregnant Mary in the guise of a 15^th century noble woman standing under her canopy or what remains of it after careful amputations of a 1911 addition during its most recent and long lasting restoration.  This picture has, aside from its compelling beauty, a history of change and movement that mirrors the wars and past traumas that have shaken even so apparently peaceful part of the world.  When I first saw it, it had been returned from sanctuary with a private family to the cemetery chapel for which it was painted.  It was almost impossible to believe such very unsplendid isolation, ignored too and still so one suspects by tourist groups for whom the diversion is not considered ‘vaut le voyage’. On to San Sepolcro, Piero della Francesco’s birthplace, the grim outskirts of the town at least somewhat left behind the great walls of the ancient centre where the Museo Civico is home to the painting many consider Piero’s greatest, his Resurrection.  Christ here is very much a man, solid too to match the Magdalen, only his face, impassive, his thoughts beyond the reach or understanding of the viewer.  The Roman guards, the SP of SPQR just visible on a red tunic, are slumbering peacefully beside the opened tomb as all eyes are drawn to the great live figure above. During World War II the town was saved from destruction by a Royal Artillery officer who stopped the allied firing in order to save this painting.

Here too is the polyptych of the Madonna of the Misericordia, currently somewhat dismantled as it undergoes a major restoration.  Those panels reassembled glow anew, their gold background echoing earlier masters like Duccio, the monumental Virgin Mary with her sheltering cloak,  a precursor to Piero’s less formal, most human, later figures. The Museum is truly a treasure house, the well known fragment of fresco of St Julian here too and an unhappy looking St Ludovico di Tolosa, the 13^th century Bishop Louis of Toulouse, whose family included a remarkable crop of generally royal saints and who seems to have fitted a lot in to a short life, since he died aged 23.  Besides such wonders there are della Robbia’s galore as also in Arezzo. Remarkable works indeed although one can sometimes have too much polychrome terracotta, like too much mozzarella, however delicious, for easy digestion.

We stayed in Florence bang in the centre in the Hotel Calzaiuoli, just by the Duomo and the Piazza della Repubblica, an hotel with all the attributes of far grander establishments aside from cost and including the sort of breakfasts, greed aside, that one could live on all day. The staff too create the hospitable but dignified air of the best old fashioned Italian hotels where the service was always the selling point over and above an understated elegance that might not suit so well the flashy expectations of today’s oligarchic travellers.  As for shopping, little time in truth for more than soap and shoes, a new provider of the former, a different, less well known Farmacia, competing, most successfully in my view with the well known scented heaven of the Farmacia Santa Maria Novella, a church that we also successfully visited after watching the queues disappearing as we ate gnudi, creamy balls of ricotta and spinach, from a comfortable vantage point in a nearby restaurant.

Wedding alternatives

The plan to escape royal wedding fever didn't really work. When the guardian outside the 5th century tomb of Galla Placidia in Ravenna takes your tickets and says 'ah, eengleesh, William and Kate', you might as well give up. World television coverage ensured an inescapable level of multi-lingual voyeuristic participation in nuptials that managed somehow still to appear as much a happy family event as a public spectacle. Everyone was having a good time with no more malice abroad than the odd giggle over an ill-judged hat.


Consecutive long weekends, whatever their excuse,plus the end of the school holidays, were bound to be enough reason for a trip somewhere. At the moment, with wall to wall summer here, finding the sun is less of a concern than usual but Emilia Romagna provided continuing warmth as well as a cultural feast. For a long term anti-establishment, communist led region, its people showed an unexpected level of surprise that we had dragged ourselves away from a closer view of our monarchy en fete.


Instead we stared, through our binoculars when necessary, at the mosaic portraits of long dead Byzantine rulers glowing high on the walls of fifteen hundred year old churches; their courts both temporal and spiritual spilling out of arched and gilded rooms into allegory filled flower gardens. At the apex of the dome in the Arian Baptistery, a naked Christ stands waist deep in the river Jordan for his baptism by John the Baptist, while, on the walls of Sant Apollinare roguish magi are frozen forever leading 22 holy virgins to present gifts to the baby. Lilies bloom, partridges and peacocks perch or fly and, on the arch above the apse where Sant Apollinare stands in a green meadow, the lambs of God march purposefully from a pavilion towards Jerusalem.

The mosaics in Ravenna are wonders of the World. The breathtaking decoration in the high arches of San Vitale no less stunning for our familiarity with the portraits of an irritable looking Emperor Justinian and his Empress, Theodora, whose stern imperial pride belies her somewhat less glorified background. Meanwhile, back in the intimate room with its starry ceiling and alabaster windows that Galla Placidia built to hold her tomb, a cross wielding San Lorenzo's white robes billow about him as he pauses in his stride towards the roaring flames heating his gridiron and offers us a look of furious conviction. On the opposite arch, the good shepherd watches from a nice cool pasture, deer graze peacefully and doves drink from marble cups.

To get to Ravennna, we flew to Bologna and spent a day or so in that terracotta city wandering the arched passageways, merchant palazzi, markets and churches. We stayed in the perfectly central B&B Conchiglia, whose location is its only real selling point. The proprietress appeared in pink stretch pyjamas at all times of day and breakfast barely featured but there are cafe's round every corner and the bathrooms were clean. In contrast, our highly reasonable B&B, bang in the centre of Ravenna, the Villa Maria de Foris was well up to the standards of a luxury hotel. Excellent rooms with spotless bathrooms full of soaps and shampoos and new towels daily; a garden courtyard; internet and Sky for the wedding highlights; fantastic breakfasts with the freshest possible pastries, yoghurt, ham, cheese and so on and capuccino on demand.


Ravenna itself is improved these days by the pedestrianisation that has taken over the centres of so many Italian towns and cities, much to their advantage. Its surrounding industries must just be endured during drives north up the coast to the villages and marshes of the Po Delta or South to the fleshpots of the Italian Riviera and Rimini and the stamp collecting delights of San Marino.


We hired a car to travel to the mediaeval squares and walls of Ferrara, where the fortress of the D'Este dukes dominates the city; to the charming 'little Venice' canals of Comacchio, hidden amidst more ugly industrianalia; to the canals and waterways where a lock system engineered by Leonardo da Vinci is marked by the most romantic pumping station ever built, the 16th century Torre dell'Abate, near Mesola; South to Rimini to see the bizarrely remarkable unfinished Tempio Malatestiano with its exquisite Piero della Francesco of Sigismund Malatesta; and to the remains of the magnificent Abbey of Pomposa with its towering campanile right beside the main SS309.


Inside the patterned brick walls of abbey church and refectory the Giottesque beauty of frescoes by Vitale da Bologna and unknown artists of the same school are a little known deight and very much worth a trip enriched further by a spectacular marble pavement added, in the 12th century, to much earlier remains. An improbable bazaar like courtyard of tourist tat stalls selling food, football shirts and plenty of indian made souvenirs is kept by the car park, mercifully hidden from the Abbey itself and presumably attracts passing busloads who may or may not have an interest in walking as far as the church.


The small roads right to the coast are signposted to the endless small lidi where holiday makers roast themselves during summer feriale in varying degrees of comfort. In the coastal fishing village of Gordino some of the fleet of small boats in the marina may occasionally be pressed into tourist service but they are rough, tough, workmanlike vessels in an area where people once toiled in the valuable salt trade that upheld local fortunes and was fought over endlessly by its rulers. Along the river banks great fishing nets hang on square frames, used in Autumn to catch the eels that are an important local delicacy on their migration from the rivers to their mystical spawning grounds in the Sargasso Sea. Truth be told, these days, the eels are scarcer and most used in tradtional local eel dishes have been farmed like the asparagus, another area speciality, and one we managed to miss by a day eating from the mobile kitchens of the annual asparagus festival in Mesola.


We ended up in Mantua, making a dash for the Mantegna frescoes in the camera degli sposi of the Ducal Palace, through the unlovely factories and power stations of the featureless Lombard plain, before our return to Bologna and home. The city's surroundings have changed so much in the many years since I last visited that it is hard to believe the mirage like first sight of the walls, towers and domes of Mantua floating above its encircling lakes. Happily, the town itself, like the Ravenna mosaics remains as remembered, only, in this case, noisier for the crowds of school children being forcibly educated in the glories of their artistic past.

One can still drive straight over the lake causeway into the cobbled square by the ducal palace and park a car with ease. We ate lunch in the sun in the square by the round church of San Lorenzo, avoiding local donkey stew whatever the temptation to get even with our bad-tempered family donkey, Esmerelda, in favour of melting tortelli stuffed with pumpkin on plates rimmed with macaroon crumbs and glasses of fizzy local white wine. The rowdiest children dispersed to other sites, we walked the long passages of the palace past exemplars of the worst of 17th century painting to glory in Mantegna's portraits of Ludovico Gonzaga, his family, courtiers, dogs and horses.

The Hotel del Borgo near the airport in Bologna where we spent our final night has little to recommend it other than the free airport shuttle and the very short time we spent there prior to catching an uncomfortably early flight to London.

Briefly in Europe

So Europe after all. I didn't expect to write about Europe on this blog but, in the planning of longer, more distant adventures, I sometimes forget occasional, even regular, trips to our nearest neighbours that may only involve a car journey far shorter than our annual trek to the Hebrides, or the alternative, quickly forgotten horrors of the cutprice shorthaul flight - easily borne by avoiding food, drink, loos, or, ideally, any luggage bigger than your wallet.

This year I have taken the car to Europe twice: once by ferry to the Hook of Holland overnight - much to be recommended aside from the tannoy wakeup calls too early in the morning - food again should be avoided if possible and not least on grounds of poorest possible ratio between edibility and cost.

In August we travelled by Eurotunnel, the easiest route of all to France, returning, somewhat mistakenly, by ferry from Santander - my husband had a vision of a superior, brief and therefore bearable sparsely populated cruise, fun enough for under 24 hours; he got an overcrowded, very large ferry where the accommodation space to cost ratio equally failed to add up. Drink and plenty of it proved the way forward; mercifully the Bay of Biscay was flat as glass.

At Easter in Holland we were on a mission; culture of course, planned to the last painting with books, lists and maps; and then, most importantly, a visit, with my Mother, to my Grandfather's, her Father's, grave and that was very odd. He was killed near Arnhem in 1944 and my Mother, like us, had never seen the grave. I don't know how she stood it actually, not so much that emotional day but sitting between two of my enormous sons on the backseat being mobbed by them and their various car amusements all over Holland as well as suffering some of my less good accommodation choices.

Cockroaches are quite irregular occupants of even lowly hostelries in Europe I suppose but we had our alternative discomforts. A room for 3; my husband with a cold and worse, a cough, a daughter and me in a minutely proportioned bed and breakfast in hideous Arnhem; my sons in a separate cupboard on tiny bunks; my Mother, the daughter of a Duchess and a powerful career woman of reasonable maturity after all, in another with cardboard dividing wall, achieving the impossibility of finding the place tolerable surrounded as it was by the rest of a most lowering housing estate overlooked by grimly dirty tower blocks. Alcohol of course played a soothing role and there were a number of shark like dogs on the streets. My Mother sees all dogs as a sort of redemption and we left before breakfast.

We stayed with friends in France, basking in a sunny luxury well beyond the scope of any 5 star hotel and leaving sadly to drive as far as the Picos d'Europa in Cantabria on the old route to Compostela and well away from coastal crowds. Rural Spain is still so extremely, happily, soothingly. Spanish and I speak none which only adds to a delightful feeling of foreigness embellished by at least one menu translation bearing such gems as 'well-cooked piece of old cow'. Well it gave the general idea I suppose, much of the rest was guess work and surprises.

Back in the Pyrenees, via the most photogenic building in the World, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, followed by lunch in the tapas bars of San Sebastian, we stayed in a boutique spa hotel in old valley village recently developed for skiing and barely patronised at the end of the summer. The Hotel, El Privilegio de Tena (http://www.elprivilegio.com/) is family run in a beautifully designed renovated abbey building and is much to be recommended for those ready to be stuffed with local wine and mountain food that requires a great deal of summer walking to be appreciated properly although skiing might do the trick better in winter.

Sadly my vision of a slow meander back through France to the Eurotunnel with a night perhaps at the blissfully crumbling Chateau de Labarom (http://www.labarom.com/) bed and breakfast near Poitier, where the home grown tomato jam at breakfast is a revelation and the sheets are exquisitely embroidered linen; and/or at some other boutique spot on the coast near La Rochelle, never came to pass. Our rather peculiar switchbacked route, involving hundreds of miles of driving backwards and forwards across vast areas of Spain was a factor of my careful planning turned on its head by my husband's strange yen for ferry transport. Serves him right.