ANTIGUA BLOG: mostly written 6/3/21:

A Rastafarian with metre-long dreadlocks worn like a turban tells me - beneath a coconut tree on Christmas Day - that his nephew played football for England.

I blink in disbelief as a surfboard zips a metre above a waveless sea alongside £200million superyachts, powered by a motor on a pole beneath the water.

I freeze as I spot in a spoonful of cooked rice mix, bought from a roadside food stall, what appears to be a cow's udder.

This is a snapshot of the fantasy paradise of joyous Antigua life into which we fell, arriving with hand luggage for a week in December 2020, and leaving two months later after England's Covid lockdown.

PARADISE, FANTASY, JOYOUS

When I say paradise, I mean it.

Leo slurps juice from coconut shell husk in our magical accommodation's tropical fruit garden, yards from the tree's giant, floppy fronds.

The swish of waves carries past a palm-thatched wooden beach gazebo to our terrace's hammock, as goats' neck bells chime from a farm on the lush mountainside. Treated like family, our hosts' guesthouse feels like our house. 

Nati snorkels over starfish as Leo - after homeschooling - plays on a beach swing I made from fishermen's old ropes, while I sit in our favourite picnic spot in the shade of a sea grape bush, repeatedly catching myself saying “This is bliss.”

Even the cows seem the happiest in the world. How wouldn't they be, in a field with coconut palms and a tree loaded with 500 ripe mangoes?

When I say fantasy, I mean it.

Nati and I play beach volleyball just beyond the infinity pool of one of the most luxurious homes at the Caribbean's biggest man-made harbour (even Leo is heard saying 'We're in paradise' as he videos us). Footnote: OK, this area was once a swamp until the 1980s.

I dance while swimming (difficult) as a yacht plays one of my favourite songs offshore a house music bar containing a billionaire boat owner's crew.

We watch New Year fireworks beside a £1,000-a-night hotel, outside which we met the Rasta (Emile Heskey's uncle).

But what I mean most of all, is when I say joyous Antigua life.

My guidebook says locals will wave to us within a week. Wrong. It takes a day. It's the friendliest place I've ever been.

Leo and I dance at a local community's Xmas street party as the tempo of a 50-person steel band rises and rises to an pulsing crescendo, in a moment of such intense energy I will never forget.

“Big up, big man!” a minibus driver yells at me as I finish another swing. Even “Hello” doesn't exist here. It's “Yeaayghh!” - always shouted - whether from a teenager or a granny.

NATURAL WONDERS A WORLD AWAY 

We are at the north-east corner of the Caribbean, the region's closest point to Britain, an eight-hour flight and a life away.

Our island measures just 12 miles by 17 and we are in the mountainous south-west corner.

I'm living in a village for the first time for 22 years. And it's magic.

Urlings is not just any village. It is an island dream, with pastel wooden clapboard chattel houses tucked in the fold of a hillside with a reef offshore and the evening chatter of residents beneath a sky full of stars.

Hundreds of fireflies magically glow and dim by beach bushes after a sunset clamber up to the old fort overlooking St John's.

“The shell is moving,” Leo blurts out one evening as one of our daily shell stash shuffles across our apartment floor. We have a temporary hermit crab pet.

“Woah!” a paddleborder beside me remarks as I swim in the ocean, telling me a two metre-wide ray just glided right beneath me.

This place is so fertile, crops even grow in the air. Pumpkin thrives on a wire fence, its roots nowhere near the ground.

A man tells me Jesus told him to swap town life to live off the land in the forest. He shows me his fields of coconut, banana and papaya trees, with remnants of sugarcane.

The next field along, stoned cannabis farmers show us their crops.

A sweeping hillside of long, yellowing grass gloriously sways as the wind turns it into a giant natural canvas.

20cm-long black and red centipedes shuffle around our guesthouse garden, while the constant loud tree frog croaks become the unnoticed, comforting sound of night.

WIND AND SAND

Pants or shorts, never both. That's Leo's and my motto.

It's just too hot – even in winter. Locals complain of cool 20C nights as I sit shirtless. Days are 28C. So what's Antigua's coldest night ever recorded? A balmy 16C.

Even the rain only lasts 20 seconds.

Caribbean islands are strung north to south, so as clouds whip across the sky from east to west, weather fronts pass swiftly.

It's a different story in hurricane season, with our village's church still missing its roof after a 2018 hit.

The beaches are ridiculous. And empty.

Visitor numbers are down 90 per cent, with just a trickle of Americans here. It's true that part of the magic is that we have it virtually to ourselves. Beaches usually covered with 2,000 sun loungers are deserted, the adjacent mega hotel shuttered.

We visit 28 beaches in all. Ffryes is our favourite, an impossibly-blue sea, backed by soft, sunset-facing sand and the world's most scenically-positioned kids' wooden playground (to which we add a bamboo raft and tree swing).

Turners, with its' coconut frond shelter/pirate hideout is virtually on a par, and then there is Jolly Harbour North Finger's (man made) meditation-inducing silent sweep of fine shells, where the only noise is the gentle whirr of the wind through pine trees.

SPOON SURPRISE

“Goawat water,” a large, grinning Antiguan lady yells at me when I enquire through the car window what she's cooking at her stall.

I establish it is goat, and water, and that's it. I order one, and rice, knock back an on-the-shack coconut rum while it's being served, and discover my spoon's cow udder – actually the tip of a pig's tail.

Goat or conch curry, oxtail stew and roti curry wraps are our favourites – but I try everything, including bull foot soup, stuffed fish, cooked papaya and delicious ducana coconut dumplings wrapped in sea grape leaves.

We eat at roadside stalls every day - and always look forward to Saturday, as locals cook and sell meals in front of their homes.

In England, we have apples. Here, they have sugar apples (scaly dinosaur skin: tastes like honey), golden apples (sour squidgy pineapple) and custard apples (firm purple watermelon).

My favourite is chocolate pudding fruit. No explanation needed.

Most fruit comes on a once-a-week boat from Dominica.

Our favourite food stall is Gina's, with its postcard-perfect flower garden. Her fisherman husband drops off the catches of the day beside Leo's swing on Morris beach. There is even a long-abandoned sugar windmill's stone tower for me to contemplate beneath my shady sea grape bush here.

BIG CONKERS

I tell Leo the conkers are really big here. It's the first day of our trip and my son, 5, is dangling from a coconut.

Lacking the locals' gravity-defying trunk shimmy, the double-handed hang is our preferred harvesting technique.

Leo drops, I grab him mid-air, and borrowing a machete, chop open the husk. The eight-month old nut has tasty juice, but no flesh. 12-month old ones have sweeter juice, and half an inch of crunchy nut.

So where are coconuts from? I was wrong – it's not the Caribbean, nor Polynesia. The answer is India and Indonesia.

It spread so fast as prehistoric voyagers shipped the 'tree of life' with them as it provided drink, food, shelter, clothing, wood, rope, charcoal, and even flotation.

Antigua now has very few coconuts - not only due to Leo and I. Most trees were de-topped by hurricanes, while disease killed the rest.

STONE STORIES

After rooting through 5ft lemongrass, we are standing at sunset at 'Stonehenge of the Caribbean,' a clutch of 1,200-year-old stone circles atop Greencastle Hill.

Thought to be an astronomical observation site, it was built by the peaceful Arawak people, themselves hounded out around 1500 by warlike Caribs (both originally from Venezuela).

With Leo on my shoulders another day, I trek through undergrowth and clamber into the thought-provoking creeper-covered conical remnants of a sugar windmill, dozens of which still stand on the the island which was once Britain's richest Caribbean colony.

Almost everyone who came here died, as they did elsewhere in the Caribbean. They just died - settlers, African slaves, white indentured servants, and soldiers. Disease meant death within just a few years for most. During Haiti's independence wars, 80,000 of 100,000 soldiers died from disease.

But there were no pirates here, for a simple reason - the island was also the Caribbean base of the British Navy.

I push the battered door of one of the handful of remaining ruined slave pens in the Caribbean, and it creaks open. In the dockside jail (were where slaves were held on arrival), I eye the rough coral stone walls and rusted iron bolts.

Five of the 12 million slaves taken from Africa were shipped to the Caribbean, locked in a 40cm x 18cm x 6ft space for the two-month journey.

The Caribbean also saw the degradation of slavery. Slavery itself was not new. But the child of a slave being a slave was new.

500,000 poor white servants also came to the Caribbean, some after being kidnapped and bundled onto boats. They were treated as slaves, and all too often not given their promised land after up to seven years' work.

PEOPLE POWER

These days, Antigua has swapped horrific for terrific. The island is loaded with great people and experiences.

Roadside stalls and fruit and veg markets toss in extra produce for free.

I stop for a haircut and shave one day, deliberately choosing the old bus stop turned into a mini garage/barbers. The mechanic's beefed-up beard trimmer appears to have a tractor motor as it pummels my cheeks.

Cars blast out soca music with enough bass to wreck nearby building foundations, then screech to a halt to crawl diagonally over speed bumps due to the trend for lowered suspension of cars and push bikes almost to the ground.

And the names of the friendly faces around us are just wonderful – take Castel, Admiral, Vincy, Dainty and Carvel.

As a note, it's the safest place I've ever been. We leave wallets, car keys and phones on the beach dozens of times. My phone is pretty worthless by then though, having dropped it in the sea one evening (while dancing).

It's not all a fantasy. Masses of spiky plants make some areas by beaches a toe-jabbing dance. And don't grab that machineel tree for balance while extracting spikes from your sandals – its so poisonous that Caribs tipped their arrows with its sap.

And, like many countries, there is litter.

So how can we give something back to Antigua, and its people?

We clear rubbish from our favourite beach lunch spot.

And, as Antigua does not collect recycling as it has no recycling plant, we stuff all our own recycling into the capital's few street recycling bins.

We spread our food spending across every roadside stall we can find.

And we leave seven beach swings, fashioned from those bits of old fisherman's rope, for local kids to play on.

We test each thoroughly, of course.

And as I swing, I think: More than anywhere else I've ever been, this really IS paradise.

PS: If you think Antigua sounds good, wait until you hear about its sister island, Barbuda.

SPAIN BLOG: written 13-9-21

 

With Africa's coast on the horizon (pictured) and my mother-in-law on board, the offshore wind blew my paddleboard away from the shore.

The biggest megaflood in history had severed the beach – near Spain's southern tip – from Morocco's mountains five million years ago, creating the Mediterranean Sea as the ocean gushed in.

This patch is where Spaniards go on holiday; the 'wrong' side of Gibraltar, where the chilly Atlantic throws bodysurfing-perfect waves onto expansive yellow-white beaches backed by dark green bulb-like stone pine trees, olive-green bushes and orange earth reminiscent of Australia's Outback.

And there's not a sunburnt Brit in sight.

It's the proper Spanish experience - and that means Spanish hours, of course. Lunch at 3pm, beach sunbathing until 9pm sunsets, and hotel kids' shows until 11:30pm.

Native-only guests ensured flamenco and food of the highest quality. Ordering squid and expecting a few battered rings, a foot-long beast was slapped on my plate.

Days earlier, our train had rushed south as Spain's sun-bleached dry heart flashed by at 156mph.

Wide plains and scrubby hills looked like Western movie backdrops (many spaghetti westerns were filmed in Spain), dotted with crumbling abandoned farms and factories.

And it was no less otherworldly in our destination, the Costa de la Luz, with sunset light creating a War of The Worlds scene as we drove through whole forests of giant wind tripods, sorry turbines.

A who's who of the biggest names in maritime history had their sails filled by those same winds, whistling through the Strait of Gibraltar.

Christopher Columbus left from here to discover the New World, Sir Francis Drake singed the King of Spain's beard here, and Britain's biggest ever naval triumph, the Battle of Trafalgar, was just offshore from our hotel.

Leo's focus, however, remained on dunking me, collecting shells and pebbles ('Daddy, Daddy, look at this beauuuty!'), and beach volleyball practice.

CHURROS AND KIPS

I knew it would be a good food holiday when, within minutes of arriving in Madrid, a cheery 'churrero' maestro had clamped a giant rolling pin to his chest to squirt dough through a metal funnel, creating churros - Spain's famous tube-like fried pastry snack - for Leo to gobble.

Green salted padron peppers and Spanish tortilla could happily be on my plate every day of my life. And to drink? Sweet sherry from Jerez, down the road from our hotel.

After a couple of restaurant stuffings, we found even 'half-rations' on menus were meals in themselves.

Stopping at a 'figs for sale' sign one day, a lady farmer showed us her family's dry but bountiful plots.

As we tried not to trip over – among other delights - three melon and two watermelon varieties, she insisted on gifting us tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, courgettes and sweetcorn – all of which Nati's mum promptly whipped into a giant veggie Peruvian paella.

No-one can accuse this blog of shying away from the big issues of the day.

Churros, dunking daddies and sherry – they're all here.

Now, an even harder-hitting subject: Do Spanish people still have siestas?

Cruising down Seville's utterly-deserted residential streets in the afternoon, I'd say a big fat yes.

Our generous female farmer friend also said yes, but it's only a 20-minute nap, in summer not winter, only in sizzling Andalusia, and mainly only older people.

And that's pretty much what studies show as well. The two-hour snooze is sadly a myth, but four in 10 Spaniards do take short kips.

Don Quixote never snoozed though - the habit only began in the 1930s, as people juggled morning and afternoon jobs.

HOT AND COLD

Drinkers are fanned with fine mist outside bars in Seville – and with very good reason.

Just 34C when we visited but with 42C summer highs, a 47.4C (117F) new record Spain temperature had been set weeks before our visit near Andalusia's capital.

But our coastal spot 70 miles away was just 25C, and cool in mornings and evenings. Why?

The epic Canary Current, which chills 2,000 miles of the eastern Atlantic Ocean from Spain all the way to Senegal.

Staggeringly, it means north-west Spain's summers are often cooler than Britain.

And sea temperatures in northern Spain, Portugal and Morocco are often just 19C in summer – colder than southern England.

In our southern tip of Spain, the sea was 23C - regarded as the minimum to comfortably swim - but still felt chilly.

Doesn't the Mediterranean's 26C water warm our cool Spanish hideaway, I wondered? No - the Med's water is saltier than the Atlantic, so heavier, sinking as it spills out of the Strait of Gibraltar into the ocean.

MARITIME MASTERS 

Europe's oldest city, Cadiz, founded 3,100 years ago by Phoenicians from Lebanon, is an old town gem squeezed onto a Venice-like island.

Romans built the most spectacular fish-processing factory you'll ever see, with temple columns and a forum adjacent to south-west Spain's most famous beach, Bolonia, backed by a giant sand dune spreading past vivid green trees.

Muslim Moors named a rocky outcrop Jabal Tariq (Say it fast = Gibraltar) in honour of their army general, as they conquered and controlled parts of Spain for over 700 years.

Columbus left from our patch in 1492 to discover the New World, meaning most of the first Europeans to step foot in the Americas - his crew – were from a nearby town.

(The explorer would never have made it back to Spain had he not understood that Canary Current above. It creates one side of the clockwise triangular trade winds pattern spanning the Atlantic. Two hundred years earlier, Genoese adventurers Vandino and Ugolino Vivaldi had also set sail for India – but, as Atlantic trade wind patterns had not been discovered, and it was impossible for them to sail north into the wind, they reached Africa and were never heard of again).

Home port for Columbus, and Spain's riches which followed from the Americas, was Seville. We saw fine colonial buildings, and, in inadvertent box-ticking, the bullring and a hen party wearing famous red-with-white-spots dresses.

But Spain wasn't ever master of the seas. Drake frazzled the king's beard by sinking 20 Spanish ships at Cadiz in 1587 – delaying the disastrous Armada invasion by a year – and a British raid destroyed Cadiz and Spain's anchored treasure fleet in 1596.

Barbary pirates from north Africa also terrorised coastal inhabitants - kidnapping a million Europeans in the 1600s and 1700s to take home as slaves.

Our local beach would have had a grandstand view of Trafalgar's 1805 battle, three miles out to sea.

Nelson's ships captured two-thirds of the Spanish-French fleet, halting Napoleon's plot to invade Britain.

Victory was due to the brilliant one-armed and one-eyed Nelson having more battle-ready sailors, and unusual tactics - sailing straight into the arc of Spanish ships in two lines, rather than sliding up up side-by-side for the usual kamikaze cannon exchange.

Soberingly, 5,000 mainly Spanish sailors died not far beyond the scattered kitesurfers we watched.

And right next to our hotel, 2,000 British and 3,000 French died in a day in in 1811, in another Napoleonic epic.

PLATES AND PADDLES

Spain's position at the gateway of Europe, Africa and the Mediterranean pretty much guaranteed its tumultuous history.

Eventually, that door will shut, as the Mediterranean evaporates when Africa's north-moving plate joins with Spain again.

But right now, Morocco's stretch of pine-clad hills, whitewashed towns and glimmering lights thankfully remains 20 miles from my paddleboard and mother-in-law, as I paddle hard into the wind and we rejoin Nati and Leo beside our sunset sandcastle.

ends

BULGARIA BLOG: written 20/5/19

Hristo Stoichkov.

That's all I knew about Bulgaria before this trip.

What do I know now? It's the oldest country in Europe but its people are Asian and its culture was almost wiped out.

And they're addicted to cheese.

OUT OF AFRICA, AND ASIA

Parts of Sofia and other towns resemble Dickensian London or Havana; crumbling 1800s houses with sagging roofs, orange slates falling off and small dormer windows.

This was the first-populated area of Europe as out-of-Africans migrated along the River Danube 45,000 years ago.

Thracians, the first culture to work gold – with a sideline in recreational drugs and orgies - arrived in 4,000 BC.

Sofia was almost capital of the Eastern Roman Empire ahead of Constantinople, and remained its second city thanks to 85 hot springs which still still flow out of snow-capped Mt Vitosha overlooking the city.

The Roman city of Serdica was hidden until 20 years ago, when subway excavations dug up a 20,000 capacity amphitheatre.

Now, remarkably, right next to Sofia's main station and square, I walk down Roman roads, marvelling at bathhouses and remains of red brick villas.

But Bulgarians are not European. Bulgars, relatives of Mongolia's Genghis Khan, came from Central Asia in 632AD and even called their leaders Khans.

Sick of using the Roman alphabet, two Bulgarian brothers dreamt up Cyrillic, based on Greek.

Bulgarian culture would have been wiped out during the Ottoman Empire's 500-year rule until 1878, had it not been for monasteries preserving the language, culture and religion banned by Muslim rulers.

Russian Communists invaded at the end of World War II, and the secret police which followed was among the most feared of Soviet states.

Bulgaria is now in the EU but still hasn't joined the euro.

SPLASH AND SOBER

They really like cheese here.

Some bakeries had eight variations of cheese pastries. The country's most famous dish - kavarma meat stew, served in Sophia's (outstanding) most traditional restaurant – was submerged in cheese.

And in a mountain village restaurant, Google Translate's astonishing live video screen changed Cyrillic words to English before my disbelieving eyes, revealing 'omelette with cheese and cheese.'

Bulgaria's mountains look like a lush, smaller version of the Rockies, with beige cliffs, Alpine meadows and gushing rivers which I found to my surprise not to be cold when our raft capsized.

Black Sea beaches are calling me for a future holiday.

Travelling in my twenties, I hated flowers, walking tours and being sober for more than 24 hours.

Now, I like botanical gardens and loved the Free Sofia Walking Tour, source of most facts in this blog - but I still couldn't resist downing a pint of beer through a 3ft vuvuzela horn on Sofia's high street.

Well, I was on a stag do after all.

SOUTH-EAST ENGLAND BLOG: written 21-9-20

        

 

Foreign forays were off in 2020 – but staycation surprises revealed the very origin of Britain, and its people.

We're sand powder hounds.

There are only four sections of sandy beaches in South-East England – so we visited them all; about 70 miles east, south-east, south and south-west of London.

A STONY SURPRISE

I picked up a dark rock in a thin white casing, looking like the end of a dog bone, in white chalk cliff-ringed Thanet, Kent, 70 miles east of London.

A week later, as Leo and I munched blackberries by a ploughed field at the very top of one of the Chiltern Hills, 30 miles west of London, I picked up the same rock.

It was so sculpted, it seemed only the sea could have shaped it.

Baffling the friends we were visiting, I announced my sudden theory the rock was formed by a sea which covered the Chilterns five million years ago.

I was only 140 million years out. More accurate than some of my journalism stories, you may say.

Now guess where, on today's map of the world, the Chilterns – and the rest of England – was when this rock formed?

Tunisia; 1,500 miles south in North Africa. 

Yes, that sounds bonkers – but it turns out England was near the South Pole 600 million years ago. (Scotland was on the Equator, with mountains as high as Everest)

So why does South-East England have stone rather than the sandy beaches common in the rest of Britain?

Because the region is made of mainly soft chalk (squashed shells). Its grains are so fine that, when eroded, they are washed away or become mud.

To get sand, you need two things.

One - harder rocks.

London and around does have some hard rocks – the 'flint nodules' I found. They are sparsely dotted through chalk and, despite being formed from squidgy squashed algae, a chemical reaction made them so hard they were the Stone Age axe of choice.

And two - a lot of time.

Flint has only been exposed since yesterday in geological terms (when a huge flood created the English channel 225,000 years ago).

That's why flints is still shingle or pebble on beaches.

They will be eroded to give South-East England sandy beaches in about 100 million years.

But remember your jacket if you fancy a day at the beach then – as Britain will be near the North Pole. (We move north-east 2cm per year).

TREASURES OF SAND AND SEA

Bolivia's famous perspective-warping Uyini salt flat lakes (the best place I've ever visited) look a bit like a beach in West Sussex.

You read that right.

The mile-long, still low tide pools at West Wittering, facing the Isle of Wight, stretch to close to the horizon and reflect the sky.

A bit like a mega natural infinity pool.

It's disorientating as, without a horizon beyond a reflective lake – as in Bolivia – it feels like you're inside an absurd painting of blue and white whisps.

And it was from abstract to adrenalin as waves rolling over an offshore sandbar enabled a 100-metre paddleboard surf (ok, on my knees).

But South-East England's best beach is Camber Sands, East Sussex.

The vast and spectacular three-mile sweep of sand is backed by a mile of 30 meter-high dunes (37 seconds to run up the steepest path with Leo on my shoulders; less to drag him down on a picnic rug). 

The little adventurer's delight at the swift incoming tide swallowing sandcastles was exceeded only by his sheer joy at digging up 'silver' pirate treasure coins – as said incoming tide rather caught out Daddy and gushed around our calves as I questioned what plonker would have buried treasure there.

Captain Hook had fortunately been on his day off that day; and not for the only time during a summer of finding buried beach hordes.

Explosions and mushroom clouds from the direction of nearby Dungeness nuclear power station threatened to cast an acid cloud over our day. They turned out to be from an Army firing range.

Camber's dunes didn't exist 350 years ago, until the beach blew inland. It created a beautiful place, unfairly maligned by its Hi-De-Hi-style Pontins holiday chalets.

You don't have to go six hours to Cornwall for cliff-backed sandy bays with rock stacks.

Thanet, Kent, 90 minutes from London, has bays, notably Botany Bay; the classic seaside fishing village Broadstairs; upmarket Ramsgate and kitschy Margate, where I literally stood in the footsteps of my great-great grandfather outside the guesthouse he once owned.

The beaches are best at high tide. Low tide reveals dark rocks and seaweed, including one particular sandal-sucking, calf-deep swamp we were compelled to cross en route to a(nother) of Capt Hook's misplaced treasure stashes.

We watched the wind blow cumulus clouds along the coasts of France and Essex, each 35 miles away, and Belgium, 80 miles away.

Storm Ellen whipped up record wind power generation as 300 towering 100 metre-high wind turbines span at three of the world's biggest wind farms a few miles offshore.

Appropriately enough, we stayed in a 200-year-old windmillers' house.

'Mudeford Spit' is not a likely name for a millionaires' playground.

But even the Bahamas' famous Paradise Island was once Hog Island pig farm.

Mudeford's wooden beach huts in Dorset stand on a 30 metre-wide strip with tufty dune grass and a sandy beach on one side, and a calm harbour on the other.

It's a Castaway feel – but huts cost £300,000, yachts dot the harbour and jetskis bounce through waves.

£100,000 luxury caravans stand by the next beach.

And five giant £500million cruise ships lay anchored offshore (mothballed from Southampton's port due to Covid).

Round the headland, Bournemouth's seven-mile stretch of sand felt luxurious underfoot.

The fact Nati swam just before October tells you how nice the sea was.

COUNTRYSIDE CLASSICS

Britain's most famous natural view is arguably where the sea slices off the end of the South Downs hills at Seven Sisters, East Sussex, exposing 100 metre-high brilliant white cliffs.

This view is not from any tourist spot, but down an unsignposted track by an old barn. It overlooks four miles of cliffs, old coastguard cottages and a New Zealand-style pebble-bottomed valley floor through which a river cuts an S-shaped path.

Another classic English countryside panorama greeted my brother Dom and I one evening near Milton Keynes, 50 miles north of London.

With a golden sun low in the sky ahead of us, we cycled downhill along the edge of a ripe field of swaying wheat, past oak trees overhanging hedges.

All of Britain once looked like Hampshire's New Forest.

I went to university down the road, but 20 years ago it was 10p-a-pint nights rather than 800-year-old trees that had my attention.

Now I love trees, not Foster's. Leo's cedar cone and conker hunting has reignited my arbor instincts.

The New Forest's moss-clad native oak and beech trees are western Europe's best example of the ancient woodland that once carpeted the continent.

Semi-wild ponies and wild pigs roam. Immense non-native pines stretch skyward. Purple heather heathland fills cleared gaps in the forest.

South-East-England's hills are the chalky ridges of the Chilterns, Kent Weald and North and South Downs.

The River Way flows out of Surrey's North Downs in a serene scene.

Had Toad, Ratty and Mole boated past on the reed and weeping willow-lined river through cows' meadows, I wouldn't have batted an eyelid.

The North Downs' steep and grassy southerly side provides awesome hikes with a view, and Leo and my favourite winter sledging spots.

Its gentle northerly slope covers most of south London, steering the Thames past classic river beaches (with easily-swimmable water warmer than the sea) in Thames Ditton, Teddington and near Richmond; home to the deer park with a lockdown car-and-adult-bikes ban, making it exercise heaven for Leo (bike), Nati (running) and me (skating).

INVADERS AND HEROES

We'd learnt the history of Britain's land – but what did we discover about its people?

Those strong winds in Thanet, Kent, helped scupper Caesar's first invasion of Britannia there, wrecking ships.

Hunting dogs and slaves were the main exports from the most important port in Britain at the time – Hengistbury Head, Dorset, then inland on a river as low sea levels allowed Roman soldiers to wade to the Isle of Wight.

Wine and olives were the main imports – and still are; Mudeford's millionaires are next door to the headland, now a hikers' haven on the coast after sea levels rose.

It turns out a sneaky trick was how William conquered England's Anglo-Saxons in 1066 – in Battle, East Sussex.

The French feigned withdrawing mid-battle, Harold's army ran after them but in doing so spread out, and the French counter-attacked.

The Normans' most obvious relics are their stout 800-year-old churches, looking like mini-castles and complete with ramparts.

Possibly Britain's best-preserved medieval town, Tudor 600-year-old houses, black-timbered with whitewashed panels, stand wonkily over the cobblestones of Rye, East Sussex.

Leo was unimpressed, insisting on stopping to make Lego.

One of William's knights built Leeds Castle, Kent, but the famous current castle is a (beautiful) fake – built only 200 years ago, 300 years after castles' defences became almost worthless.

Repelling archers and pouring boiling oil on swordsmen clambering up ladders was one thing – but gunpowder and cannons were quite another.

A crooked funnel on top of a cute circular building in Kent means it was an oast house, used to fire and dry hops to make beer 200 years ago. Beer heritage remains strong here – with stacks of local breweries.

On the last day of our holiday, something wonderful happened in the clear blue skies over Seven Sisters' cliffs.

A purring Hurricane Second World War plane banked and dived, rehearsing for the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, when dogfights laced these skies south of London as brave men fought for the freedom of our land.

DIFFERENT IS NOT BETTER

Let's be honest. Brits like to say other countries are better than ours.

We say we go abroad for holidays because the weather, beaches and food are better than here.

It's a novelty to be in another country and culture. But other countries are actually different, not necessarily better, than Britain.

We should appreciate Britain more – and be proud to acknowledge it. Who needs a passport to have a holiday when you have this on your doorstep?

CROATIA BLOG (written 6/9/19)

If you want a sandy beach in Croatia, come back in 10 million years.
So it's just as well Croats don't like sand.
Travellers – me included – search for white grains like the holy grail. But Croats complain sand is dirty.

Balkan beaches are too young for their rock to be worn into sand by waves and wind.
And so Croatia has pebbles – and that means size is everything.
White and smooth and 2cm wide is lovely underfoot and on the eye, 5cm rounded is OK, but 10cm and rough is awkward – but still popular in a country of rock-loving sand-haters.
And the Adriatic Sea? Transparent, clean and even with coral – a first for me in Europe.

OLD TOWN DELIGHTS
Every town in Istria (northern Croatia) has an old warren of lanes with cobbles worn slippery-smooth and somewhat crumbling houses with big shutters and balconies - looking very like buildings in Venice.
That's because the people wearing the cobbles smooth for 500 years were...Venetians, in charge from 1267 to 1797. 'Venetian Gothic' is the architecture style.
The town of Rovinj inparticular has lanes so narrow neighbours could touch across the street from first-floor windows.
Pleasingly – unlike in other countries' often over-restored old towns – these lanes are lived-in, with old ladies stringing washing from upper windows.
The Italian influence continues today and it's everyone's second language, despite the Austria-Hungarian Habsburg Empire being in charge for a century until 1918.

The Romans were here first. But these days, the world's best-preserved Roman amphitheatre (the original height for an entire 360 degrees; it once sat 25,000), rather than gladiators, now hosts World Cup football screenings and music events.
The volume can't be turned up too loud, for fear the 2,000-year-old walls will collapse.
Leo bobbed along to drum 'n' bass at his first ever music concert.
Shows getting the biggest attention at Pula's famous amphitheatre are those by national heroes, the simply brilliant '2 Cellos,' the world's most famous classical music pop cover performers.

TUSCANY AND TRUFFLES
Away from the beach and old towns, the countryside is in places Tuscany-esque, with tall pine tree-lined roads, yellowing fields and a scattering of kazuns; 200-year-old, dry-stone, 10 metre-wide circular shepherds' huts (a good use of rocks littering fields).
Coastal areas are tangled with pretty bright green trees loaded with pine cones (Leo now even says he prefers them to conkers).
Briyuni Island, a car-free mini Tuscany just offshore, has lagoon-like water and 125 million-year-old, 60cm-long dinosaur footprints, when the land the beasts stood on was amazingly 2,000 miles south where present-day Libya is.

Istria's olive oil has been voted the world's best four years in a row, so that accounts for all the olive groves.
And there are plenty of grapes for wine – although our favourite was the sweet blackberry variety.
The countryside's most sought-after treasures are truffles - and not the Cadbury's Roses chocolate version.
But the pricey fungus tasted like a garlic overdose to me.
Fruit and veg shops are stacked with produce almost entirely from Croatia.
And the garden of the house we stayed in had apricots, mandarins, limes, grapes, pears, apples, strawberries – and the fruit seemingly every garden has; figs.

SLAVIC SUPER-STATE
Yugoslavia was formed in 1918 by Slavic peoples to prevent Italy marching back in after World War I. Slavs had had enough of centuries being controlled by Italy and Austria-Hungary in the north, and Turkey's Ottoman Empire in the south.
Yugoslavia's constituent parts were areas we now call Serbia, Kosovo, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia and Slovenia.

What seemed a decent idea – teaming up to prevent bigger powers taking over - was ruined at the start and the end of the 80-year period by some Slavs' hatred for one another.
Inter-ethnic fighting dominated World War II, before the fighters winning internal wars formed the world's most successful communist state, with a booming economy and free travel.
But leader Tito died after a 34-year rule in 1980, the economy collapsed, ethnic and religious (Catholic v Orthodox v Muslim) tensions grew and, after Communism collapsed, states withdrew from Yugoslavia.
Appalling Serb-driven wars starting in 1991 killed 140,000 – half in Bosnia – with (also Serb-driven) ethnic-cleansing, genocide, war crimes and massacres, including in Sarajevo and Srebrenica (shamefully under the noses of Dutch UN soldiers).

The Slavic countries are not friends now, but some peoples are, to an extent - for example Croats and Serbs.
Life seems normal now in Croatia, the first Yugoslav country in the EU (but not yet the Euro). Bosnia is still struggling.

CROAT CHEERS
Tourists – who loved Croatia in the 80s – are back in hordes. I'd never seen a hotel comparable with the spaceship-like, 500 metre-wide one we walked past in Rovinj.
Everywhere is clean; there's no litter anywhere.
I enjoyed learning some Croat. My favourite new word (it means 'cheers') is zivjeli - pronounced 'djibili' - hard enough to say before the first rakija grappa shot, never mind after several.
And my toast?
Peace in this pretty land.

NORTH-EAST ENGLAND BLOG: written 29/8/18

I once wore shorts to visit family in north-east England, and it was snowing when I arrived.
A nearby moor-top reservoir usually looks like it belongs in Hound of the Baskervilles.
And Whitby's windswept beach is better known for being sand-blasted than sun-baked.

But this time was different.
Stand-up paddle boarders were on the reservoir (Scaling Dam).
On the Costa del Whitby, the harbour could have been in Greece, with a lake of water, al fresco diners, graceful fishing boats and twinkling lights.
The August Bank Holiday heatwave was so hot we even saw a three-foot grass snake.
And on the Teeside Riviera, locals cowered in the shade for fear of melting on the streets.

Ee ba gum, as they say around here. It means 'by god,' by the way.

HOME TRUTHS
I've blogged about French Polynesia and Indonesia – but this blog is closer to home, and closer to my heart.

I'm not from London, where I was born and live now.
I'm not from Lincoln, where I grew up.
My family – and therefore me - are from Stockton, a town 200 miles north of London.
Here, my grandparents lived, ran corner shops, worked for Home Guard patrols in World War II, and enchanted my childhood visits with joyous memories of farm visits, card games, home-made biscuits and fudge.

Houses and beer are half the price of London here. But life seems twice as nice.

YORKSHIRE LIFE
Real-life Postman Pat.
That's one way to describe the area's North York Moors, where we stay with family in a beautiful old house with flower-decked gardens.
There are farms, rounded valleys formed by glaciers' meltwater - and nearby Lealholm, described by the Sunday Times as the 'prettiest village in Yorkshire.'
Between the nest of light-grey stone houses straddling a humpback stone bridge, kids – including mine – love playing on the stepping stones in the River Esk, in which I swam for the first time since childhood.
The sunbathing throng meant no-one was using the village green's horseshoe-throwing quoits pitch.
But the shop selling lush fresh scones (Nati!) and ice cream (Leo!!) was open.
The pub is the centre of the community, selling locals' rabbit, pheasant and beef - and with a darts board with no trebles.
Yorkshiremen's gruff accent soon melts after a pint.
The phone service on my phone says nowt, of course, but - ey up, lad - that's part of the appeal.

STEAMY NOSTALGIA
It was from Postman Pat to Thomas the Tank Engine as the North York Moors Steam Railway's engines chuffed and Leo cheered.
We were back in the 1950s and the heyday of rail, with pastel-coloured station tearooms decked with 60-year-old posters promoting beach resort day trips.
George Stephenson's assistant built the railway, but when it opened in 1836, it was pulled by horse, and even rope on one hill.
These days, the soot-caked, sweating faces of engineers shovelling coal into fires on the world's busiest steam railway belong to 100 staff and 250 volunteers, one of whom told me he had worked on the line since it reopened in 1976.
Steam is romantic and nostalgic – but just not practical: it takes four hours' coal burning to build up enough steam pressure to power an engine.
We stopped off at the village of Goathland, with its train station used as Hogwarts station in Harry Potter, and where TV show Heartbeat was filmed.

PURPLE PATHS
Over the purple heather one way is Whitby, with a replica of local boy Captain Cook's Endeavour in the harbour, the Abbey on the hill and a straight-off-the-boat fish market.

Over the heather the other way is Stockton, one end of Stephenson's world's first steam rail line to Darlington in 1825.
The line, built to take coal from mines to the port, saw the town boom.
My parents were born there in the post-World War II baby-boom, the years of rationing, the excitement of the first cars and TVs, knowing everyone on your street and leaving your front door unlocked.
The town's engineering industry slumped in the 1980s, but the friendliness remains, always notably higher than London.

MEGA HISTORY
Giant-scale theatre sees a helter-skelter history of England told in the 'Kynren' show.
It's part-inspired by the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony and is held in a coal-mining town near Durham.
Its 8,000 seats sell out for every show. If it was near London, it would be a media sensation.
Swords clash with the Romans, Vikings, King Arthur and William the Conqueror; you can actually smell the smoke from the Industrial Revolution's chimneys; and cinema-style surround sound is stunning for the growl of a World War II plane.
There's even snow, in my favourite scene: the mist-shrouded World War I battlefields Christmas truce.

During the show, Leo was the most animated he has ever been watching anything, waving his arms like an orchestra's conductor.
500 volunteers are the show's actors, and most have performed every summer Saturday for the past four years.
An ex-banker who went to school nearby dreamt up the show to bring tourists to the area.
He recruited Steve Boyd, the laid-back London-based American who has directed mass choreography at every Olympics ceremony since Barcelona 1992, and guided Nati and I as we danced in London's Olympic opening ceremony.

Oh, and 'Kynren'? It's Anglo-Saxon for 'generations.'
This blog is the tale of my family's generations.
My kynren, or as we say in modern English, my kin.

MUNICH & AUSTRIA BLOG (15/8/19)

A man in lederhosen (leather shorts) strolled through the arrivals hall of Munich's glimmering airport.

He was not a tour guide.

He was not on a stag do.

I've seen Peruvian women in bowler hats in Andean fields, American Indians in blue dresses in supermarkets and Indonesian monks in orange robes on mopeds.

But the 70-year-old Bavarian man in Munich was the first European I'd ever seen wearing traditional dress not for a special occasion - but as part of day-to-day life.

Despite appearing impractically hot and of little use apart from for filming a YMCA music video, the leather loin gear was once worn across much of the Alps.

FAIRYTALES AND...SURFERS?

We also spotted Robin Hood-style trilby hats with feathers.

That was appropriate, as we were in the land of fairytales (Brothers Grimm, publishers of Cinderella, Snow White and Hansel & Gretel were from Bavaria), as demonstrated by a trip to a kids' fairytale theme park (the talking tree had Leo entranced).

Munich's strong regional identity feels different from the rest of Germany – and that's as Bavaria ('Bayern') was its own kingdom for 700 years, until Prussia united in 1871.

We got up-to-date using electric scooters to visit surfers - yes, surfers – on a river in mega English garden park, complete with conker trees.

SHANDY SURPRISE

Bavarians like drinking. A lot.

I felt tough ordering a one-litre stein of 'Hell' lager in the world's second-biggest beer garden, the 6,000-capacity Augustiner Keller, so big staff drive a small lorry to collect glasses.

But a revelation is that most people in Munich's beer gardens don't want to get drunk.

How do I know this? The biggest queue is always for 'Radler,' a 2% beer and lemonade shandy.

So how terrifying was my stein of 'Hell'? The word actually just means pale beer.

I ordered a bratwurst and a lonely sausage was placed on my plate. Do you have any bread, please? No, we don't serve bread.

That must be an American invention then.

Giant dollops of sauerkraut yellow cabbage and sweet red cabbage were my side dishes.

And that really is what we saw the locals eat.

My preconception of Munich's beer gardens was based on London's Winter Wonderland festival beer hall, a feelgood singalong and dancefest of Take Me Home (West Virginia), Summer of 69 and 90s EuroDance.

But it's only Oktoberfest (originally a celebration of a Bavarian king's wedding) which has the singalong.

Munich's beer halls and gardens rarely have live music.

MUSIC, BUT A DARK PAST

We did finally find a brass band to bob along to in Hofbrauhaus, the world's most famous beer hall, which I very uncomfortably discovered later hosted the first meeting of the Nazi party.

Munich shamefully was the home of Nazism as Hitler exploited the economic crisis after harsh World War I Versailles settlements, and Germany's widely-held belief it had been unlucky and should have won WW I.

Hitler sold postcards to tourists in Munich before becoming the most evil man in history, building the first concentration camp and main SS training centre at nearby Dachau, beginning the Holocaust  and its 11 million victims.

Tour agencies even offer tours of Hitler's Munich. I was utterly appalled at the idea.

So, from the country that started World War II, to the one that started World War I.

GIGANTIC VIEWS, GOULASH & GELATO

I felt like I was on the front of an Alpen box as, as cow bells chimed, I munched muesli on a village house's terrace, facing Innsbruck's 2,000-metre high Alpine wall.

Well, Austria is the home of My Muesli, a shop boasting 100 varieties and even mix-your-own.

Some of the village's magnificent flower-decked, double-balconied, wooden-fronted giant homes even had painted murals on their walls

Leo picked apricots and blackberries. Grapes even grow at 1,200m altitude, despite being snow-covered for four months of winter.

The most surprising crop, however, is sweetcorn, with field after field of it.

Stunning narrow streets in old towns nod to long-gone times.

Austria was one of Europe's largest powers through medieval times, as rich rulers paid Mozart, Beethoven and Strauss to base themselves in Vienna.

It inadvertently started World War I in an attempt to hang onto its Balkan states and territories. Austria lost and its land was stripped (Tirol, where we stayed, is now two-thirds in Italy).

But it wasn't all Heidi, yodelling and thigh-slapping.

We shovelled in fluffy calzone pizza in a swish restaurant overlooking the lake in which Leo then swam by himself for the first time.

For Leo, the lake also had the 200m-long best children's playground I'd ever seen. For Nati, it had lush creamy gelato. For me, it had beach volleyball courts (yay!...I mean yah!).

We spotted camels in the Alps – but that was at the circus.

Even my German was improving. Some words are the same as English e.g. garten, haus. Some are like French. Some are like Chinese.

Candidates for my favourite moment of the trip include managing three bowls of goulash in one sitting, and, the same day, four gelatos.

But sitting with Leo at the top of the first Alpine hill he climbed, as he picked purple, yellow and white wildflowers as church bells peeled from three villages...now that really was magical – like one of those fairytales.