WHAT ARE YOUR SUMMER PLANS?

A ques­tion I’ve heard a lot re­cently is “What are your plans for the sum­mer?” I as­sume peo­ple are in­ter­ested to know and are not just find­ing out when I won’t be at home so they can rob my house. Yet, the more I think about it, the more I find I’ve be­came cu­ri­ous to know what peo­ple have lined up for their hol­i­day.

As this issue pro­vides read­ers with ideas for how to spend their time off (pages 20-35), I de­cided to ask around the of­fice what the staff and con­trib­u­tors are plan­ning to do this sum­mer, and whether they had any rec­om­men­da­tions. Here’s what they told me.

Nicole Mil­lar: Every sum­mer I go back to the UK for a month. My hus­band is al­ways away in July, so it’s a good time for the kids and I to go back to Eng­land to see grand­par­ents, other fam­ily mem­bers and friends.

I highly rec­om­mend Corn­wall as a sum­mer des­ti­na­tion. For us Span­ish liv­ing peo­ple, it is an es­cape from the heat and there is so much to do. Beau­ti­ful beaches, rock-pool­ing, sail­ing, surf­ing, open water swim­ming, trails to ex­plore, epic hills to ride your bike up, or flat trails for fam­ily rides, the list goes on... .

Matthew Tree: We’ll be vis­it­ing my Dutch fa­ther-in-law, who’s in a res­i­dence south of Am­s­ter­dam: a truly lovely man, whose in­cip­i­ent de­men­tia doesn’t pre­vent him from being great com­pany. And then we’ll be going to Den­mark, mainly be­cause we haven’t got a clue what we’ll find there and partly be­cause I’m (a lit­tle) cu­ri­ous to see what it’s like to be in a coun­try whose lan­guage has half the num­ber of speak­ers than does Cata­lan.

As for a hol­i­day des­ti­na­tion, I rec­om­mend Aus­tralia. Be­fore I went there, I thought it’d be like Eng­land with kook­abur­ras, but it turned out to be a rev­e­la­tion: a com­pletely dif­fer­ent world, packed full of sur­prises, most of them – but not all – good ones.

Mar­tin Kirby: We will break with tra­di­tion and stop work­ing for a few days – our Pri­o­rat farm cot­tage is al­ways booked out in sum­mer – and head for the de­lights of Not­ting­ham in Eng­land. We’d love to have time to ex­plore the haunts of Robin Hood, but we are there briefly for the wed­ding of our dear niece Leila.

Give Turin a look. Per­fect for a short trip, or stay and ex­plore the area in depth. We walked every­where and loved the ar­chi­tec­ture, vibe, food and set­ting with the back­drop of the Alps. A very im­por­tant motor city, of course, with ex­cel­lent mu­se­ums, and it is fun to spot lo­ca­tions of the iconic film The Ital­ian Job.

Brett Het­her­ing­ton: We have no plans but that’s usual for us. If we could af­ford to go some­where we would, but we can’t so we won’t. It’s a pity but also the re­al­ity of many peo­ple in Eu­rope, where rel­a­tive in­comes are the low­est they’ve been for 40 years.

As for a hol­i­day des­ti­na­tion, I rec­om­mend Japan. At this time of year it’s bet­ter to avoid the ex­treme hu­mid­ity by going up to the rural north of the main is­land Hon­shu or even to Hokkaido which is also beau­ti­ful and com­par­a­tively un­spoiled.

Miquel Berga: Now and then, we Cata­lans, feel we have been mis­placed (or pun­ished) in this cor­ner of the Iber­ian Penin­sula. It was some­one’s mis­take not to let us be sim­ply Ital­ians, north­ern Ital­ians to be pre­cise. That’s why, when we feel a bit ex­hausted about the gen­eral sit­u­a­tion around us, we long for Italy. We are tak­ing an Ital­ian trip this July: a cou­ple of weeks in and around Fer­rara, the charm­ing, lit­er­ary town in the Po val­ley and pre­tend, for a while, that we are highly civ­i­lized hu­mans, Cata­lans liv­ing in the right penin­sula.

For the sum­mer there’s noth­ing like mo­tor­ing along the nar­row roads of north­ern Scot­land, mov­ing from Bed&Break­fast to Bed&Break­fast, from pub to pub, from is­land to is­land, fol­low­ing the whisky trails... en­joy­ing dra­matic land­scapes and the oc­ca­sional sunny spell and let­ting the rain speak softly to us every, well yes, every day.