A Headful of Travel Memories

First holiday memory?
Holidays in Scarborough during the late 70's and early 80's. A self-catering flat in the North Bay, rowing boats by day and brightly coloured lights at dusk at Peasholm Park. The little train at Scalby Mills. Swimming at the open-air baths. The chair-lift. Waffles from the waffle shop. Being taken to see Star Wars at The Futurist with my Dad in 1977. My mother setting fire to the chops and the fire brigade being called out and the flat smelling and tasting of smoke for the remainder of the holiday.

Favourite place in the British Isles?
The Highlands of Scotland. I love their drama and mystery and their sheer jaw-dropping beauty.

Best holiday?
My first holiday without my parents is one I remember fondly. Two weeks with a couple of friends in a tent on a campsite near St Tropez, in the South of France.

Cuba was also a country that fascinated me. It was hard-work at times, but the people, the sights, the music, the politics and all the curious contradictions in between is something that's stayed with me in the years since my visit.

But probably my best holiday was the three month trip I took in 2012.

What have you learnt from your travels?
People's need to communicate and connect with other people is universal. The world is not as big as we might think. There is beauty and wonder in the most unlikely places. And there appears to be an Irish pub in practically every country in the world!

Ideal travelling companion?
Someone practically minded, organised and easy-going, who wouldn’t be offended if I wanted to go off on my own for a few hours. Someone who finds wonder in the smallest of things and is content to just 'be'.

Beach bum, culture vulture or adrenalin junkie?
Culture vulture, without a doubt. I love the sights, smells and tastes of a new place as well as the history, architecture, art galleries and museums. Much more interesting to me than lying on a beach or flinging myself off something big and scary.

Greatest travel luxury?
Apart from unlimited time and resources to be able to travel, my greatest luxury would be an iPad Mini. I travelled round SE Asia, Australia and New Zealand planning and booking everything with my iPhone. My eyesight isn’t what it was, so a bigger screen would come in handy.

Holiday reading?
I took Anna Karenina on my three month trip. It took me practically the entire trip to finish it. Otherwise, something with a bit of intrigue, a thriller or a mystery perhaps.

Where has seduced you?
Cambodia and Laos utterly utterly seduced me when I went there in 2012. Cambodia, despite its horrific history, has a dignity and grace that is reflected in the gentle smiles and kindly disposition of her people. And Laos is just a breathtaking country with beautiful people.

Better to travel or to arrive?
I enjoy both. I enjoy the anticipation of the journey and the planning leading up to it, but I also enjoy arriving and being able to finally explore your destination.

Best hotel?
Hotel Icon, Kowloon, Hong Kong. An oasis of style and calm at the end of a three month trip, with stunning views over Victoria Harbour.

Best meal abroad?
A traditional Vietnamese 'clay pot' meal I had in Nha Trang, Vietnam was beyond description, but the meal I had in Siem Reap, Cambodia, a simple vegetarian 'Khmer' potato curry, was outstanding.

Favourite city?

Dublin. My spiritual home. I also like New York.

Where next?
Iceland and South America.

Dining In The Dark

This evening I had the good fortune to be invited to a 'Dining In The Dark' dinner. The concept is simple, guests wear blindfolds, with one person on the table remaining sighted to avoid any catastrophes. In the case of this dinner, it was to raise awareness and fundraise for a local visual impairment charity, their co-ordinator being in attendance.

From the minute the blindfold goes on your senses immediately become distorted. Eating in a dining hall of some seventy or so people, the first thing you notice is the wall of sound that distorts the sound of everyone speaking around you.  The first feeling I encountered was one of isolation. You have to concentrate much more to hear what other people are saying and being able to distinguish between different voices and from which direction their voices are coming.

At one point I sat in silence and listened. I even closed my eyes behind the blindfold. In a sea of noise, it was quite a calming experience. It feels rather like being in a cocoon or tunnel of some kind. When you do speak, you find yourself overcompensating by speaking louder and exaggerating your voice. It's much more difficult to engage with someone sitting next to you if you can't see them. It's true that so much of our communication is reliant on visual tics and cues we take from people's eyes and facial expressions.

And then there is the eating itself! The first course was soup, served rather helpfully in a cup, rather than a bowl. I should start by saying that all of the food was completely delicious and part of the enjoyment of the occasion was trying to work out what we were eating with each course, because we didn't know beforehand. You need to be rather trusting of your chef and waiting staff!

The chef, Marc, had carefully crafted the menu with an interesting combination of flavours, textures and ingredients. The most revealing aspect of eating this way, is the realisation that you really do eat with your eyes. By being able to see, for example, that there is a carrot on your plate, your brain recognises that it's a carrot and by the time the food reaches your mouth you're already anticipating what it will taste like. When you don't know what you're eating you're completely reliant on your tastebuds to tell you. And the experiment proved to me how bad my tastebuds actually are! I failed to guess on each course what many of the ingredients were!  A major talking point for us all during each course was to work out what we were eating.
"Ooh, is that sweet potato?" someone asked. "I think there are onions in this somewhere" someone else said. The textures were confusing. At one point I thought I was eating shredded beef or pork only to realise when I was half way through eating the dish that I was actually eating fish.

Of all the courses, the main course was probably the most difficult to eat as it required you to use a knife and fork without necessarily knowing if you were aiming them in the right direction. Many of us brought the forks to our mouths after several seconds of trying to attach food to them only to discover that we'd missed our target on the plate and were eating air! Someone at the table mentioned  they'd read people eat less if they can't see what they're eating because they stop eating when they're full rather than when the plate is empty.  Or because they give up trying to snag anything! Some of us resorted to eating with our fingers, a tried and tested method of ensuring we at least got something to eat and didn't go home hungry!

All in all it was a fantastic experience. It brings home to you how much we rely on and take for granted all of our senses when we're in a dining situation, and how incredibly difficult it must be for anyone who has a visual impairment.  We only experienced it for a few hours but for our guest and other visually impaired people that is their experience every day.

If you ever get the opportunity to take part in a 'dining in the dark' supper, I really would recommend you try it.

Incidentally, this was our menu:

Cream of courgette and tarragon soup

with red and green pepper bruschetta

Sea salted cod wrapped in Parma ham

with pea puree and sweet tomato sauce

Oven roasted red pepper (v)

filled with sun-dried tomato and butter bean ragout

Twice cooked chunky chips

Baby leek and baby carrot

Brandy snap basket

filled with popcorn ice cream and dark chocolate ganache

topped with puffed rice and cappuccino tuille

A death in the family

A relative dies during the opening few days of January.

Although terminally ill, their death is no less shocking or devastating.

You can see the effect it is having on your loved ones but feel powerless to do anything. 

You're surprised by your own reaction to the death and the tears you're shedding for someone who, though you were close to as a child, had been something of a ghost-like presence in your life over the past few years.

The long sighs, the staring off into the distance. The sadness etched on a sibling's face.

That he died alone, with very little to leave the world, adds an extra layer of sadness.

That the confusion he left behind and its lingering impact leaves you frustrated you can't do more.

Being reunited with family who these days you only see at funerals.  They looker older; shorter; greyer; have less hair; are thinner; are fatter.

The coffin and a single flower arrangement. 

The regression to your childhood as you stand in your relative's house and remember all the family gatherings and the laughs and smiles that you've enjoyed in this room.

You promise to keep in touch, to plan a visit but acknowledge that probably the next time you all meet will be at the next funeral. You look around and wonder who, of those in the room, it might be.

Your heart breaks a little more.

Music in the 80's

While I write, I'm listening to Southern Sun by Boy & Bear, a tune I heard on BBC 6Music about five minutes ago and subsequently downloaded to my iPod. By comparison, in 1985, there was a song I'd heard on an episode of 'Moonlighting', the American detective show starring Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis. I wasn't too sure what it was so I wrote a letter to Annie Nightingale who had a request show on BBC Radio 1 on Sunday evenings and I tried to describe as best I could what the song sounded like. A week or two later, she read out my letter on the show and played me said song. Sympathy For The Devil by The Rolling Stones. That was how I discovered music in the 80's.

It is not overstating the case to say how important Annie Nightingale's show was to me in the 80's.  It was my ritual every Sunday night, once the chart show was over, to lay on my bed, usually in semi or pitch darkness, with the glow of the tuner on my hi-fi the only light in the room, listening to her playing music that opened up my mind to the possibilities of other worlds and sounds beyond what was played on Top Of The Pops or Radio 1. Don't get me wrong, I was a regular and avid watcher of TOTP, but to hear artists like The Cocteau Twins, Joni Mitchell and Led Zeppelin being played, well it was too exciting for words.

TV also had a big part to play in my discovery of music. In 1982, Channel 4 was launched and with it a music programme featuring presenters who, to an impressionable teenager like me, were unbelievably cool because they tripped over their words and swore on live television. The Tube, broadcast live on Friday evenings from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne was ground-breaking television and paved the way for shows of a similar ilk, such as The Word. Jools Holland, Paula Yates and Muriel Gray were witty, stylish and cool. Then there was The Old Grey Whistle Test on BBC2 with presenters like Bob Harris, John Peel and Mark Ellen. Not as cool perhaps, but no less important.  And I was always deeply envious that I didn't live in the North West so I could watch Tony Wilson on Granada Tonight. Another ground-breaker.

Television continues to produce shows profiling new music. Later with Jools Holland is a great show to discover some amazing new artists. And Channel 4 and BBC4 produce some quality late-night output. But it's fair to say that television's role in launching new music is not as vital as it once was.

Because now we have the internet.

It has never been easier to gain access to an incredible stockpile of music than it is now. Anyone born after say, 1985, doesn't know what it was to try to find music that was a bit more interesting than the normal chart fodder. Now it is literally at your fingertips with sites like MySpace, Spotify, LastFM, iTunes, Facebook, Bandcamp etc. The list is pretty endless.  And then there are the thousands of digital and internet radio stations out there.

These days, I find most of my music through BBC 6Music and Twitter. 6Music is my new Annie Nightingale.  The DJ's care about the music they play, a vast majority of them are or were musicians themselves. You can hear the joy in their voices when they play a song they love or when they share a new album with their listeners.

Twitter is also an amazing resource for discovering new music. There are people I follow who are musicians, who work in the industry, who write about music and then there are those who just love music in all its forms and with whom I can have great conversations and share recommendations. You can even talk to (or stalk) your favourite bands and DJs about music.

You can also just wave your smartphone in the general direction of a piece of music and an app will tell you what the song is!  How incredible is that?

Festival No 6

A festival like no other in a place like no other.

A Centenary

My grandmother was born on 12 February, 1913.  Had she lived, 2013 would have been her 100th birthday. Born in Bury, Lancashire to Richard and Clara Royles, Grandma, also called Clara but known as Clare, was the youngest of eight children. She died in 1988, two days after her 75th birthday and her death had a profound, shattering effect on my life. I still miss her. 

I remember going to Lancashire on holiday during the hot summer of 1976 to visit my relatives, Grandma’s brothers and sisters, who were, by then, quite advanced in years. There was the formidable Aunty Florrie, an Amazonian woman with the temperament to match, married to the mild-mannered Uncle Billy, who wore leather driving gloves and drove an Austin Maxi; the gentle and sweet-natured Aunty Emily, with her little round glasses and kindly, smiling face; and the mysterious Uncle George who I met only once before he died. He was bed-ridden and I was ushered into his room to see him in hushed silence and told not to disturb him. There is a photo of me somewhere, standing in front of Uncle Billy’s car in white knee socks and a sun-dress my mother had made, my long, blonde hair tied with ribbons and my eyes squinting against the sun. 

I spent most Friday nights at my Grandma’s, sleeping over in a big double bed with cold, cotton sheets filled with hot-water bottles that would burn your feet, in a house with no central heating. In the winter, ice would form on the inside of the windows and the pipes would freeze. I had a grey, overnight case I used to pack with my nightie and slippers and Bruin, my polar bear, a gift from Grandma and Granddad’s trip to Norway.  On Saturdays we caught the double-decker bus into town and went for lunch in one of my Grandma’s favourite restaurants; either Crombie’s for fish and chips, served with bread and butter and a pot of tea, or The Blue Lagoon where my Grandma would have moussaka and I’d have liver and bacon. Grandma would leave a coin under the saucer as a tip. It made me feel terribly grown-up.

There are little things I remember. The way the skin on the back of her hands use to crinkle like fine tissue paper. The way she called her corset her ‘stays’ and would ask me to help ‘button her up’.  I loved the way she brought out her best cups when the insurance man came and served him Mellow Birds coffee and Abbey Crunch biscuits. I loved her freshly baked scones hot from the oven dripping in melted butter, and her Yorkshire puddings that seemed to defy gravity. She kept the butter in a dish by the fire that would melt into a golden pool.

I loved bringing out her jewellery and playing with it. She had button box I used to love playing with. I’d sink my hand into the mounds of buttons and spend hours sorting them into colours and sizes.

I loved climbing into bed with her on a Saturday morning to keep warm before heading downstairs to light the temperamental grill on the gas oven to grill the bacon for sandwiches.

I loved her black and white television set with the buttons you had to press really hard to change channels and the uncomfortable 1950s sofa with the lumps in. I loved the roaring coal fire in the living room, the heat of which would burn your shins and turn your face pink, and the brass candlesticks on the mantelpiece where she used to hide my pocket money - 50p a week.  Such lovely memories. Happy 100th birthday, Grandma.