Masked anxiety

So there we had it: our first flights in over a year: to Edinburgh and back for a four-day break. The only ‘foreign’ holiday this year, as everywhere else was either booked or that plonker Grant Shapps has placed it on the red list, or the amber list, or the amber-plus list, or the oh-what's-the-point list. Or Iceland. And, yes, it wasn't lost on us that the train from London to Scotland would have been more environmentally friendly, but with exorbitant ticket prices for a family of four, plus a five-hour journey each way, we wanted to both maximise our budget and what little holiday we were actually able to get this time.

Edinburgh was, thanks for asking, very pleasant. So pleasant we got engaged there. Yes, I am now a fiancé. The things you do on holiday, eh? What was noticeable in the charming Scottish capital was, firstly, how relaxed it felt for a busy administrative city, and secondly, how well drilled everyone appeared to be under Ms. Sturgeon's jurisdiction. Call the Scots Nats upstarts if you will, but Covid-discipline was impeccably observed wherever you went, even by the vast majority of tourists. There really was precious little obvious civil disobedience when observing the still-enforced coronavirus etiquettes, both social distancing and mask wearing in shops, restaurants, on buses, and inside attractions. No one, from what I could tell, was abstaining on grounds of belligerence or twattery, and that made for a pleasantly anxiety-free time. Only the occasional tourist - who clearly hadn't received the memo - sauntered around indoor venues with their fizzogs fully on display.

You see, I’m a self-confessed zealot when it comes to observing the COVID rules. Despite having had two jabs and indeed a mild dose of the virus itself back in November, I’m diabetic and over 50, and bloody paranoid about catching this thing again (a possibility - even the double-jabbed health secretary Sajid Javid got it). 

I’ll admit that having a  compromised immune system is partly the result of my own misadventure, but I can’t help being 53. Basically it meant that the final leg of our journey back from Edinburgh, from London City Airport to home, was one tightly knotted ball of anxiety, as every carriage we entered on the DLR, the Tube and the SWR train was full of maskless Covidiots, looking back at my petrified eyes, peering over the top of my mask, as if to say “Yeah? What’s your problem?”.

To be somewhat fair, part of the problem is not necessarily ignorance but our dear Prime Minister. Ever since Boris declared 19 July “freedom day”, the wearing of face masks in England has been largely a matter of personal choice. How very doctrinal. This is despite warnings from the scientists - those people who, it would be decent to point out, know a thing or two - that easing rules on masks will reduce public protection. So with “personal choice” the most ambiguous health and safety stipulation you could make (I could jump out of a hot air balloon without a parachute or cut off my legs with a chainsaw - it’s all a matter of personal choice), it’s no surprise that anyone with an aversion to wearing masks, due to comfort, personal freedom or because being told to do something is not for them leads to people cramming onto our trains with their faces bare, breathing in and breathing out in crowded compartments with little concern for their own wellbeing and, more bluntly, mine.

This all stems from one of the few consistencies throughout the pandemic in the UK: inconsistency. And indecision. Boris Johnson appears so eager to please freedom-loving party acolytes that something as simple as mask wearing in environments where the virus can be passed with amusing ease can not be countenanced out of common sense, above anything else. It’s why London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has deemed that masks will remain mandatory when traveling on all Transport for London services, including the Underground, buses and trains. Not that he’s been able to enforce the rule, as our journey home the other night amply demonstrated.

“I’ve repeatedly made clear that the simplest and safest option would have been for the Government to retain the national requirement for face coverings on public transport,” Khan has said. “But ministers aren’t willing to do what’s right. I’m not prepared to stand by and put Londoners, and our city’s recovery, at risk.” He has since doubled down on that view, last week calling for mask wearing to be made legally enforceable with criminal prosecutions an ultimate sanction for failure to comply. Khan’s view is partly out of the hope that a bye-law on London’s transport network would partly reduce any further spread of COVID-19, but perhaps as importantly, it would increase the confidence of commuters like me in returning to the capital for work or pleasure, giving a much-needed boost to the economy. Sadiq Khan says that 86% of passengers do observe the mask etiquette, but that means that a sizeable 14% don’t, which is a problem as scientists have said repeatedly that masks only curb the spread of the disease if everyone wears them. I think we’ve lived long enough with the Covid numbers to know what risk that represents to public health. 

However, imposing such rules is still reliant on enforcement. Given the number of trains and buses operating in London, most of which now are driver-only (and in the case of the DLR, driverless), restoring guards as, effectively, enforcers, on the scale required would be problematic. Transport for London has some 400 enforcement officers already, but given the prevalence for some of London’s finer citizens to carry knives, you can understand the reluctance for confrontation. This places extra pressure on depleted police ranks to enforce what is at present little more than a polite request.

Picture: TfL

The challenge for Khan, however, isn’t just safety: TfL faces a budget deficit of as much as £500 million over the current financial year, having been severely impacted by the pandemic. As restrictions ease, Khan desperately needs people back on public transport. That said, there are already signs of private car usage increasing, and second-hand car sales have gone through the roof as people spend saved cash on used vehicles to get around in.

Back in Scotland - where Nicola Sturgeon has appeared to be one step ahead of Johnson throughout the last 18 months - the government intends to continue with the wearing of masks “unless exempt for special circumstances” until at least next year. “The law says you must wear a face covering in most indoor public places including public transport,” official guidance states. “The Scottish government recommends that face coverings should be worn when moving around when it is crowded. This is encouraged for busy outdoor events.”

In England, Boris has customarily faffed on the issue, conceding that “If it’s not mandated it probably won’t do any good” and that he “expected” people to carry on wearing face coverings in enclosed spaces, which is hardly an imposition. Here, in the midst of all this, is us and especially me, the paranoid. The trouble is that the issue is now at risk of getting bogged sown in politics. One scientist worries that this will mask the actual point about wearing a face covering to begin with: “We know wearing masks, particularly in crowded, poorly ventilated environments, has a big impact on the levels of transmission that can take place,” Professor Clifford Stott, who sits on the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (Spi-B), told LBC last week. “But also I think [that] wearing a mask is also communicating to others about a sense of responsibility, and I think that’s a key issue in mask-wearing now, unfortunately. It’s become almost a little bit politicised whether one wears one or not, which is I think a shame.” Stott is firmly of the belief that masks have had a “big impact” on stopping transmission.

In truth, according to the Office for National Statistics, mask wearing in England hasn’t changed all that much in the last month since the legal requirement to wear them in enclosed spaces was dropped, with figures showing that 95% of people were still covering their face when leaving the house. Our public transport experience, however, suggested otherwise. Perhaps it’s an East London thing, as the majority of abstainers were on the DLR west from London City Airport, and then from Canning Town to Waterloo on the Jubilee Line. That degree of mask-free fellow passengers has done nothing to restore my confidence in getting out and about again. A shame after so many months cooped up at home (including three confined to the sofa following foot surgery). I’ve been desperate for freedom to return, but I won’t hide my anxiety at what I see as other people’s inconsideration and ability to comply with something as relatively simple as wearing a mask.

Perhaps, then, it’s just for me to deal with, but it does rub with me that my liberty can be curtailed by an inconsiderate few. Perhaps I should move to Scotland, where Sturgeon’s position - admittedly, not universally accepted - has at least been unambiguous. “It is my view that if a government believes measures like [face coverings] matter, and this government does, we should say so,” the Scottish First Minister has stressed. I won’t gloss over the fact that the overall numbers are falling, as vaccinations and so-called ‘herd immunity’ take effect. It’s true, too, that the R rate appears to be dipping, but with the school holidays in force, this may well be the ‘circuit break’ needed. 

Come the autumn, and the possible return of colds and flu as more and more companies open up their offices for the first time since March last year, the whole issue of travelling to work on public transport will come under the political and clinical microscope again. This, I’m sure, will put Boris’s chronic prevarication on the line.

Crete balls of fire

© Simon Poulter 2018

There is a stray cat, one of millions loose on these islands, stalking me around the house. I open the back door to let some morning sunshine into our kitchen, and it is there yelping at me. I walk up a level to the living room, then through the patio doors and there it is, yelping at me on one of the numerous terraces this big, multi-layered house we've rented in Crete appears to have. It's as if it has thermal imaging and can track me through the house's interior.

The cat's relentless meowing is then completely drowned out by the roar of a fighter jet, looping around over the Akrotiri peninsular, a stubby little knob of land towards the island's western end. It is home to Chania International Airport, the start and end destination for countless holidays as well as, it would appear, ageing F4 Phantom fighter-bombers of the Greek Air Force, screaming off to practice war. All this noise notwithstanding, I am incredibly, unbelievably, overwhelmingly and many other adverbs, chilled out.

In fact, I haven’t felt this degree of relaxation, this disconnected from life's tribulations in...well...I cannot actually remember when. Sure, I’ve had relaxing holidays in the past, but none I can remember where the compulsion to do anything other than lie in the sun and read a book has been magically removed. And that, as I reach the end of this amazing, blissful week under poster paint-blue skies, is the conclusion from my first ever visit to Greece and its islands.

Over the last 30 years I’ve tended to holiday in places like California, where every day is an endless road trip. Relaxation would be driving into the Mojave Desert with the latest supermarket sweep of (in those, pre-Brexit referendum days) cheap new CDs from Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard, with which to simply gawp at the Great American Wilderness. On other occasions I've whizzed around south-eastern Sicily in search of filming locations for Il Commissario Montalbano or, last year, obsessively exploring northern Sardinia for places where The Spy Who Loved Me was shot. All fun stuff, I swear. Just not completely relaxing.

So, when my girlfriend - no stranger to the Greek isles - suggested Crete, and then found what has turned out to be a fantastic house to rent in a small, quiet hill town north of the ancient port of Chania, I had little reason to say no. Simply because I’d never been anywhere in Greece before and, frankly, it all sounded idyllic. And thus it has turned out to be. Profoundly so. And yes, I do mean all those salads and lovely little beachside tavernas that no Greek travel guide can fail to mention. Or this blog.

Now, I’m sorry if I’m coming late to the Hellenic party (and with my lengthy Balearic and Italian history, this substantial part of the Mediterranean has hitherto escaped me), but I have absolutely loved it here. Firstly, the sun has shined every day and the temperature has been at least 30 degrees. Tick that. Secondly, I have eaten more than my own weight in Greek salad and actually feel healthier as a result. This is a precedent that was set on our first day when, on the 100-mile drive from Heraklion (yeah, I know - we're staying near one airport and yet land at another on the other end of the island...), just past Rethymno, we stopped for lunch at a beach cafe so achingly cool the bottled water we guzzled didn’t even need to have come from a fridge. Being two hours ahead of the UK, we'd already lost track of time. It may have been mid-afternoon by the local clock, but we stayed for what seemed like hours (mostly because we'd ambitiously ordered salads each, which turned out to be the size of one of the smaller Greek islands).

© Simon Poulter 2018

It’s always a testament to a good holiday that you feel you’re on one soon after you arrive. From that beach lunch onwards, it’s been the same. Relaxed. Chilled. Whatever expression of insouciance you care to apply, that’s been us. The house in Chorafakia has a small pool and a choice of balconies, verandas and seating areas with which to while away the days. Technically, the house is made of two: almost by accident we discovered an entire basement apartment, complete with kitchen, bedrooms and a properly equipped living room, like a well-provisioned nuclear bunker beneath the other-purposed property of someone expecting to see out a particularly irradiated winter. For those days we chose to hang out there, the house was perfect (thanks, Vintage Travel), with a superbly provisioned welcome pack on arrival (which actually lasted the week), and a jolly ex-pat handyman from Devon on call to take care of one or two minor technical things that needed fixing.

There is so much to the well-storied Crete that seven days is barely enough to scratch the surface of the Chania end of the island, let alone anything else. Chania itself is a delight: the world's fourth oldest city, under permanent population for four thousand years, with its charming Venetian port mixed with bustling modernity. If you visit, lunch at Salis on the port's eastern end. You will not be disappointed. Equally, indulge a little tourism and take one of the glass bottom boat tours out to an island 20 minutes away, where you can watch the thinnest man in Europe attract various species of small fish to congregate beneath the tub. If you remember your swimmers, you can even dive in with him.

But, I guess, the main attraction of these Greek islands to most tourists are the beaches. If you have an aversion to vast, industrialised commercial resorts, the Akrotiri peninsula has the antidote, less than a kilometre from our patio - Tarsanas. It's just the kind of cute, sandy, family-friendly cove you'd expect from the guides - splendidly unpretentious, a delight to swim in, with an informal beach cafe and, overlooking it, the most romantic taverna you will ever find. Anywhere. Around the headland is Stavros, made famous by Zorba The Greek, the uplifting 1964 film about an unlikely friendship and starring Anthony Quinn and Alan Bates. Sitting on the beach on a busy Sunday, looking up at the huge, triangular rock that provided a backdrop for Quinn and Bates, a local cafe will bring drinks and food to your sun lounger, for a premium, of course, or you can lever yourself up to one of several other establishments offering good food and cold drink (yay, Mythos beer!) at significantly less than exorbitant prices.

© Simon Poulter 2018

As my post the other week [Package delivery] should have conveyed, sitting still on holiday is an unusual experience for me, less so being in the confined and relatively regimented environment of an all-inclusive hotel. Likewise, I’ve rarely been one to not bother looking at the time, or simply slap on the Factor 30 and bury myself in a good book for entire days at a time. But that is exactly what these two consecutive holidays (“Get him, turning into Colleen Rooney...!") have been about. And as much as the previous week in all-inclusive Majorcan sunshine was wonderfully 'holiday', these seven days in Crete have been magical. Dreamily so. The kind of excursion that you spend the next 51 weeks longing for. And I don’t think I could give any more stronger endorsement than that.

The beginning of the end for the sunbed war?

Until I went on a Mediterranean holiday last year I'd lived under the impression that the sunbed wars - that atypically xenophobic British tabloid trope - were over. On consecutive previous holidays - to Florida, Sicily and California - I'd not once found the issue of lounger larceny an issue. But no.

There, as I breakfasted at a reasonably early hour (actually, unhealthily early, despite being meant to be on holiday...), most mornings in Sardinia last September I saw the telltale flapping of an unaccompanied towel, unsecured on a sunbed in a strategically viable location for catching the sun for the best parts of the day. I won't mention the nationality of the owners of said towels, because they know who they are and, I'd suggest, you do, too.

That said, it's not just the you-know-whos who are responsible for these lapses of poolside etiquette: on my Caribbean cruise in October, the mania for people queuing for the free breakfast buffet at dawn was accompanied by sun loungers being not-too subtly 'reserved' in the most strategic sunspots. And that was on a cruise ship notably free of any continental Europeans.

So the travel company Thomas Cook has come up with a solution to the problem, one which The Sun today trumpeted in its inimitable style. In what is clearly an extension of airlines charging for reserving a seat, Thomas Cook has launched the excitingly-named "Choose Your Favourite Sunbed" online service, in which - for £22 - holidaymakers will be able to reserve a sunbed for the entire length of their stay. The scheme will be trialed in three hotels from the end of February before being rolled out in 30 hotels this summer.

Thomas Cook (which, perhaps significantly, competes with the German travel group Tui) has diplomatically positioned the new service as being a family-friendly scheme for groups of hotel guests who want to spend more time together in a preferred spot. The service follows a trial last year by the firm of a similar scheme  which allows customers to select their hotel room before they arrive in their chosen resort. More than 10,000 holidaymakers used it.

"Traditional package holidays are a thing of the past," said Thomas Cook UK managing director Chris Mottershead in a press release. "Holidaymakers today want to personalise their package, mixing and matching the elements that best fit their needs and lifestyle. We're excited about the opportunity with Choose Your Favourite Sunbed, particularly among families that want to secure a number of beds together in a specific spot."

The scheme will work much like airline seat bookings over the web, with a certain proportion of sunbeds in each hotel bookable, and selected using an online map displaying the beds as well as a compass to help people work out where the sun will be at different times of the day. For those who don't want to pay the convenience premium, other beds will be available in the usual way.

Source: Thomas Cook

Now, there are going to be people who think it all a bit unnecessary, that Johnny Foreigner should simply play more fairly. And there are those who'll think it a bit petty. And there's me, who thinks that we should all just get on with each other, and spend our holidays lacing daisy chains in each other's hair, while joining in rousing choruses of I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing.

But the truth of the matter is, in the words of Ben Elton, we are all at root selfish farties: we want a relaxing holiday, where we don't bother setting the alarm clock, but we can handle the fact other nationalities are up before us. On the other hand, should we be charged even more money - on top of our Speedy Boarding and Premium Economy seats simply for a piece of furniture? Well, perhaps if it matters that much, the Thomas Cook scheme isn't a bad idea, if it means that families - in particular - can enjoy the peace of mind of knowing their precious two weeks away will be spent together.

Speaking of Mr. Elton, however, here's a 32-year-old reminder of how spot on he was when describing just how protective we can be of personal space...

Learning to sit still again

© Simon Poulter 2017

Holidays. You wait, impatiently, all year long for them to come around, and then once they arrive, you can't decide what to do. Well, at least I can't. Some can pitch up at their hotel, unpack and then flop onto a sunbed for the whole fortnight (or four weeks if you're French), headphones clamped to ears, a couple of airport paperbacks to thumb through to keep boredom at bay. Me, I'm a restless soul before I've even touched down. In fact, I need to unwind before I can unwind.

I've never been one to spend a couple of weeks just basting in Factor 50. The holiday hire car provides me with the mechanism to escape that. On my last Italian holiday - to the baroque south-east corner of Sicily - I had 'Montalbano Country' to explore, the comuni of Ragusa, Modica, Scicli, Donnalucata and Punta Secca that aggregate to form the fictional Vigatà depicted by Italian TV's Il Commissario Montalbano. Indeed such is my slavish exploration of pop culture while on holiday that I've spent vast chunks of trips to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami behind the wheel, nerdishly looking for filming locations for The Rockford Files, Bullitt and Miami Vice. I once spent a wet Sunday morning traipsing around a suburb of Seattle in search of Jimi Hendrix's grave. You've got to be in it to win it.

For this year's 'summer' holiday I have consciously stayed clear of America (largely to avoid Trump's increasingly divided and, frankly, insane territory) and returned to Italy. Specifically, Sardinia. Having spent so much time in my beloved Sicily I decided to break 'new' ground. All I knew about this island was that it has exceptional beaches, is expensive, wealthy Italians from the mainland like it very much (along with the megayacht-owning classes), and The Spy Who Loved Me was partially filmed here. Actually, that was all I needed to know.

In fact, it was a charity screening of the film, following Sir Roger Moore's death in May, that drew me to Sardinia: TSWLM was the first Bond film I was taken to see at the cinema (the Granada in Kingston) and it has stuck with me - despite there being better Bond outings - as quintessential to the oeuvre. From the pre-title sequence and 007's apparent Union Flag parachute departure to its denouement within villain Stromberg's aquatic lair, its final third revolved around what appeared to be a landscape of exotic European beaches, all budgie-smuggling posing pouches and leathery overtanned skin.

Here marks the aspirational aspects of Bond: yes, his lifestyle is one few can afford, let alone sustain, but if you squint very hard, you, too, can visit the same locations and at least imagine you're 007. Even if you're driving a rented hatchback, rather than a gleaming white Lotus Esprit S1 armed with anti-aircraft missiles, mines, torpedoes and a cement sprayer. Oh, and which converts into a submarine.

(Top) Q hands over the Lotus to Bond at the quayside at Palau
(Bottom) Porto di Palau today
© Simon Poulter 2017

Inevitably, then, before I could settle in to my holiday and devour a pile of rock biographies under a withering sun, I had to satisfy my craving for film trivia. First, this entailed a long drive up the thrilling coastal road near Sassari along which Bond and his Russian counterpart Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach) in the Lotus are chased by, respectively, a motorbike and rocket-as-sidecar combination, the steel-gummed Jaws and cronies in a Ford Cortina, and then Navy's Rum girl Caroline Munro apparently flying a Bell Jet Ranger with machine guns.

It's hard not to hear TSWLM's mid-70s synth soundtrack in your head as you swoop and swerve around bends in the road which look uncannily familiar. But, of course, instead of assassins and helicopter gunships, the most daunting challenge you actually face are the endless platoons of Dutch and German motorhomes clogging the island's coast roads.

Most of the film's Sardinian scenes were shot in and around the Costa Smeralda, which draws a pretty wealthy (some might say Eurotrash) crowd each summer. It is prime Bond territory, adorned with well healed tourists dressed atrociously but expensively, and who are not afraid to stock up on more atrocious and expensive garb in the exotic shops of Porto Cervo, a town seemingly purpose-built to serve yachtists. Not for nothing are there branches of Louis Vuitton and Gucci right smack in its centre. Which is about all the town has going for it. If you like expensive sterility combined with an architectural similarity to The Flintstones' Bedrock, then Porto Cervo is for you.

© Simon Poulter 2017

Around the coast - whose principle interest is a series of absolutely stunning beaches - is Cala di Volpe and another TSWLM location, the Hotel Cala Di Volpe used by Bond and Amasova as a staging point before heading out into the Mediterranean to visit Stromberg in his giant submersible. The hotel is über-glamourous, but with rooms starting at Eur 300 a night, and a bottle of San Pellegrino water in the lobby bar going for Eur 15, you can see why it would have appealed to Bond's somewhat stratospheric tastes.

But with Bond interiors mainly shot on the giant 007 soundstage at Pinewood Studios, it is somewhat mad to walk through the hotel and realise that you're actually in a James Bond set.

More insanity follows when you sit down with your expensive bottle of water in the lobby bar itself, looking out onto the hotel's private bay, and discover that you're right in front of where Bond first meets Munro's saucy 'Naomi', as she takes him out to Stromberg's lair under the disguise of being a marine biologist.

(Top) The Hotel Cala Di Volpe's private jetty © Simon Poulter 2017
(Bottom) Bond is met by Naomi as she whisks him off to Stromberg's submersible

There is one more must-see port-of-call on this Bond pilgrimage, just around the coast from the hotel, and that is the beach at Romazzino where Bond and Amasova emerge implausibly from the sea in the Lotus, having out-manoeuvred Stromberg's undersea soldiers and reconverted the vehicle back from submarine and into a mid-1970s British sports car. You can tell it's era simply by the fact it shared its door handles with the Austin Allegro. Not for nothing was this marque known in the motor trade by the acronym Lots Of Trouble Usually Serious, which means the idea of a Lotus of that era being capable of travelling on land, let alone under water, without something going wrong was a true stretch of the concept of suspension-of-disbelief. Still, the scene in TSWLM is one of the most memorable of any Bond film, and Moore's incongruous ejection of a sizeable fish out of the window as it emerges from the turquoise waters was brilliantly in keeping with the somewhat camp humour that marked his period as 007.

(Top) The beach at Romazzino where (Bottom) Bond and Amasova emerge from the sea in the Lotus Esprit
© Simon Poulter 2017

Sardinia certainly provided TSWLM director Lewis Gilbert and his location scouts with some glorious settings. Indeed, if you simply associated the Costa Smeralda with the word 'beach' you probably wouldn't need to think of anything else. No wonder it draws hordes of German holidaymakers here. On roads like the SS125 that snakes through this northern tip of the island, every third car seems to have a German number plate. You notice that on the way to your hotel from the airport at Olbia, a warning sign that any time spent around the hotel pool will require a tolerance of that age-old Teutonic custom of grabbing sunbeds with dawn-defying enthusiasm. Yes, I know, hoary-old stereotype, but not without merit. It would appear that customs honed on the beaches and at the hotel pools of the Costas, the Balearics and the myriad Greek islands are equally exportable here.

Sardinia is a big island, probably as large as Sicily, and therefore from experience one you'll never cover in two weeks, not if you want to spend some time, at least, reading a book and dialling out the crap you have to deal with for the other 50 weeks of the year. And just like Sicily, where I have split my visits according to whether I fly into Palermo in the north-west or Catania (or, more recently Comiso) in the south-east, Sardinia is a choice between the Galluran north or the south around the island's capital, Cagliari. For my Sardinian debut I'm glad to have taken the northern choice. With its myriad coves and exquisite, alabaster-white beaches, each with dreamily romantic restaurants and cafes looking out onto implausibly warm, azure waters, you can't help feeling that, even if you're not traipsing around churches, museums and ancient burial grounds, you're not entirely denigrating the island's culture. Or its geography.

Sicily is an enchanting island, with an interior of dramatic mountains with towns bewilderingly stuck to them like limpets on a seashore rock. Sardinia possesses a similarly dramatic volcanic interior, but the landscape is gentler, even more welcoming. Driving up into the hills, or hopping from coastal town to coastal town, grabbing a caffè here or a panino there, is as relaxing as lying next to the pool for a solid two weeks plodding through the latest Grisham (especially if, as I tend to do, you've got a fully-loaded iPod to plug into the car's Bluetooth audio system). Indeed Sardinia's roads are the closest you can get to flying your own plane without a pilot's licence (or...er...a plane) - bends that require your absolute concentration, but with a rhythm to the steering and gear changing that becomes both exhilarating and relaxing at the same time.

As you drive, towns you wouldn't expect to hold any interest do so. The port town of Palau - visited as part of my absurd Bond obsession - is actually a very pleasant place to stroll. Further north, Santa Teresa Gallura - the gateway port to Corsica, a mere 11km across the water - is a picturesque gathering of pastel-shaded houses below a main square with its cafes and easy-going restaurants.

© Simon Poulter 2017

It's one of those quintessential towns you probably only ever visit on a Mediterranean holiday: wander away from the tourist crowds on a hot afternoon and you wonder where life itself has gone to.  Siesta time, even in this corner of Italy, is one of stillness and shuttered calm. It's the sort of environment that draws the romantic to dream about buying holiday homes (just don't - however TV's Homes Under The Sun depicts it, it never turns out as you'd imagine it to be...). Wandering around deserted streets like these, finding shade when you can, is another part of satisfying the restlessness spirit I take with me on holiday, that prevents me from just chilling out poolside. Exploration like this might not come to anything - no souvenirs bought, no locals engaged in conversation - but it still draws me far closer to the place I've come to stay in than occasionally ordering a cappuccino from the pool waiter, and then trudging off out each evening to eat pizza. Nice as such holidays are for some, such excursions here in Sardinia have done what any holiday should do in resetting and recharging, and providing fresh perspective on the daily routine and doldrums that, after two weeks, you inevitably have to return to. You know, bills to pay and all that.