On the first day we crossed Istiklal and stole through the precinct of a Greek Orthdox church (it was open to the public, but I still felt like we were trespassing) to a little café in an alley shaded by awnings and lined with low tables and stools. We ate tost (‘toast’, or Turkish panini type things) and drank little glasses of tea. After a walk along Istiklal and down to the Galata Bridge we turned left along the waterfront and after an hour or so of leisurely pottering we came to a dusty promenade overlooking the Bosphorus.

The waterfront was pedestrianised, ratty and buzzing with life. We sat at plastic garden chairs belonging to a café run from a rusting metal shack and ordered more tea; as we drank, we watched fishermen casting their lines into the Bosphorus and donating small fry to patient stray cats; we watched ferries, cargo ships and dinghies plying the river, and we raised our eyebrows at the cars, scooters and vans which brazenly ignored the whole “foot traffic only” thing. The people watching was peerless too: weather-worn old gents shuffled by in their worldwide uniform of shabby, slightly-too-large blazer and drab trousers; gypysies wrapped themselves in layer upon layer of clothing and headscarves even in the 30-degree heat, and the young Turks who passed by were almost all dolled up to the nines.

We talked about this for a bit, and I finally realised what it was about Istanbul that I’d been trying to articulate for my last few visits — it’s this striking gulf between the level of personal and social wealth which had been perplexing me. The fabric of the city is noticeably less well kempt than the threads of the young people who promenaded along the waterfront: paving slabs are broken or missing, the roads are a patchwork of potholes and botched pothole repairs (okay, so not so different from Edinburgh), and most obviously of all, town planning is utterly absent. Sure, certain individual buildings are terribly ostentatious and well-finished, but they’ll be in an unsuitable location and within a few years they’ll be left to fall into steady disrepair like all the others. It feels as if nothing is ever maintained much beyond its construction, and the approach seems to be that it’s far easier just to tear something down and build a shiny new replacement for it. Rinse and repeat.

We talked about this for a while longer then headed back to the research centre for the night’s party. I dressed up as much as I could (that is to say a short-sleeved shirt, a pair of jeans and grubby Vans), discovered that it was rather more of a suit-and-tie/cocktail dress affair, as I was in possession of neither a suit nor a cocktail dress I spent the rest of the evening apologising to people for my attire and getting drunk to mitigate my embarrassment. Leigh made me dance at the end of the night. I think she still likes me.

The next day we did almost nothing until it was time for dinner, where upon we visited a series of cool, elegant bars set in high-rise tower blocks and sultry courtyards, each of which was inhabited by singularly blinged-up punters, and each of which was cursed by singularly awful toilets. The real Istanbul is never very far away.

Oh, wait. That’s not like what I’m doing — that is exactly what I’m doing.

Leigh was in the UK a couple of weeks back for a conference down in Durham, and so I caught the train down there to meet up with her on the Friday evening. I gave my Dad a call on the train down. He answered and said: “Oh, good. You’re alive. We thought you might be dead.”

Apparently, about a week previously a 32-year-old cyclist had been killed in a collision with a bin lorry on the road to my work. My parents’ frantic phone calls to me had gone unanswered; unbeknownst to them, I was in the air on a flight to Istanbul at the time.

“Maybe next time you’re planning to be abroad, you could let us know…?” he suggested, and I agreed.

Central Durham is, it turns out, astonishingly picturesque. On Saturday we had coffee in the sun by one of the old stone bridges across the Wear, walked up the hill to the ancient, massive and intricately decorated cathedral, and finally descended to the riverbank to visit the endearingly amateurish archaeology museum, complete with a laughable/unnerving mannequin dressed untidily in the manner of a Roman soldier. I’m being flippant, but Durham really is worth a visit.

That afternoon we got the train to Newcastle to meet up with a old friend of Leigh’s, and again I was amazed by how pleasant a place central Newcastle is. Let’s face it, this is not a city which presents a particularly attractive prospect to passing train passengers, but having spent an hour or two pottering around in the shadow of the Tyne Bridge I was converted.

We were back in Edinburgh in time for a drink in the Basement and then dinner at l’Escargot Bleu on Broughton Street. It was an excellent meal. This particular Saturday evening was apparently the culmination of a week-long visit to Scotland by a load of student chefs from Breton, and the menu was devised for that one night only. We started with mussels with white wine and lardons (Josh would, I suspect, have been rendered teary-eyed with untrammelled joy), followed by an enormous pot au feu and then some entirely unnecessary and entirely awesome crêpes with ice cream. It was faultless. Go there.

On Sunday I’d planned to drive us to St Andrews, but this plan faced a succession of ludicrous obstacles. First, the car wouldn’t start. It was parked nose-in to the pavement, rendering a normal jump-start impossible. No problem, I thought, I’ll pop open the bonnet and charge the battery with this portable battery charger, bought with just this eventuality in mind. Unfortunately, having opened the bonnet, the battery was nowhere to be seen. Surely it’s hidden by one of these bits of plastic cowling for which I don’t have the correct size of screwdriver. I’ll borrow one from the café down the road. Oh, I see. Now that I’ve removed the plastic panels I see that the battery is not, in fact, in the engine bay at all.

At this point Leigh looked up from thumbing through the GTV’s maintenance manual and said, “It’s in the boot.”

I opened the boot, found the bit of carpet concealing the battery and hooked up the charger. We sat in the car to wait for the battery to charge, Leigh wearing an expression of amused contempt the whole time. “Let’s give it a go,” I said after a few minutes, and turned the key.

The engine cranked sluggishly but did not catch.

“Alright, let’s let it charge up for a few minutes more”.

This time the engine turned over with a little more vigour, but it was clear it wasn’t going to start up.

“Balls.”

I caved in and called Neil. He and Vanessa were in town with their own car, and they agreed to drive by and help us jump-start the car. A jump-start was possible, of course, only because of the car’s nose-in attitude and the situation of the battery in the boot. Irony is my co-pilot.

Neil & Vanessa rolled up fifteen minutes or so later. “Thanks, guys. This is amazing,” I grovelled, “I’m really sorry to have to drag you over here.” They were gracious, and Vanessa indulged only slightly in the mockery to which she was entirely entitled. Neil, however, fiddling with the bonnet of his own car, was perplexed.

“How do you get the bonnet open?” he wondered. We all attempted to help, and I was reminded of the scene at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The scene with the monkeys.

Eventually we got the bonnet open, hooked up some jump leads and started the car. It turned over and caught almost immediately. I was overjoyed. We arrived in St Andrews about 3pm, after a…spirited drive, and spent a couple of hours wandering around the castle and the ruins of the cathedral. I’d been to the cathedral innumerable times as a kid but had never really appreciated its scale, but having visited Durham’s own cathedral the day before I was suddenly able to visualize how it must once have been. It’s a shame that so little of it is left; it must have been huge in its day.

We drove back via Anstruther, stopping for some fish & chips — again, excellent food, if less studiedly so than at l’Escargot Bleu — and then home to Edinburgh. On Monday we met up with Austen, Maria and (for the first time) Leo for breakfast at Peter’s Yard, then spent the rest of the day pottering around to no great effect. It was, in short, a fantastic weekend.

Our pension was right at the top of La Rambla, Barcelona’s main pedestrian drag. On our first night we took a left down La Rambla and walked halfway down it to Plaça Reial, a square formed by colonnaded arcades, furnished with some Modernista lampposts (Gaudí’s first commission, as it turned out) and lined with open air cafés. We found a table, ordered a couple of beers and sat down to watch the endless flow of people as they crossed the square. There were a few study-looking metal chairs scattered about, apparently in lieu of the benches you might otherwise expect to find in a place like this, and most of them were occupied by homeless people looking for somewhere for a surreptitious pull on something alcoholic. One chair just across from our table, though, bore a youngish guy wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He was out for the count, head thrown back and mouth open in a drunken stupor.

After a while, he woke up and stood up unsteadily. A waiter from the nearest café asked him how he was, and satisfied that he wasn’t about to kick off, left him alone. Then, in front of the many, many people enjoying an al fresco drink in the square that night, the wobbly drunk guy stuck his hand down his trousers and had a wank.

This was unexpected.

Finished, and presumably satisfied, he lurched off down the nearest street leading off the square. We left shortly after that too, heading home in the opposite direction.

Each day followed the same relaxing template (although drunken wankers were mercifully absent from the days to come): we’d have a coffee in a café just down La Rambla, do a bit of touristy wandering, have a late lunch then a siesta and finally head back out for drinks and dinner. The city was packed with tourists but also, if you ventured off the beaten track a little, a lively place in itself. By comparison, Edinburgh seems quiet and reserved away from Princes Street and the Royal Mile.

We went, as I believe is legally required on any visit to Barcelona, to la Sagrada Família. I was prepared to be underwhelmed; I’m not an art nouveau kind of chap, and anything hyped up to this degree, I thought, whether a building, painting or sculpture, is surely bound to disappoint.

I was wrong. The studied insanity of this building is breathtaking to behold: if any modern building is capable of causing Stendhal syndrome in a visitor, then this is it. You enter through the precisely fluted arches of the ‘Passion’ façade, and this entire aspect of the church defined by a sort of CSG explosion of hyperbolic curves, planes and polygonal surfaces. The idea that Gaudí could have designed, drafted and supervised the construction of these intersecting shapes before the advent of computer modelling is almost inconceivable. This façade also has a pyramidal arrangement of the Stations of the Cross, with angular, anguished figures by Josep Maria Subirachs depicting various episodes from Christ’s final journey to Golgotha and the crucifixion. There’s an almost cheery figure of Christ ascendant perched jauntily on a lofty crossmember between the façade’s two central towers; I read that the sculptures provoked controversy upon their installation, and I can’t help but wonder if the spectre of the recently deceased Son of God apparently having a gay old time up there had a little to do with it.

The interior is restrained by comparison, but it’s still an amazing display of detail and scale. Each of the walls reflects the style of the corresponding façade, so that the ‘Passion’ wall is all straight lines and regular curves, while the opposite wall has a much more traditional feel to it. Pass through its doors and you look up to see the ‘Nativity’ façade, where Gaudí took your common or garden Neo-Gothic cathedral and melted it. It’s astonishing to behold — I hesitate to say that I liked it, but it’s certainly a spectacle and a half — with traditional statues perched on ledges reminiscent of frozen rivuelts of molten candle wax. The was the first façade to be completed, back in 1930, and they’re already having to conserve it even though the building won’t be finished until around 2026.

Gaudí only ever drew rough sketches of the third, final and largest ‘Glory’ façade. Reproductions of his drawings are on show in the museum in the bowels of the church where his workshop used to be, and I am happy to report that the ‘Glory’ façade will be just as monumentally bonkers as the first two. If you only ever see one thing in Barcelona, go to la Sagrada Família. It’s both awesome and fantastic, in the literal senses of the words.

One blazing hot day later in the week we walked down to the port to visit the Museum of the History of Catalunya, set in an old warehouse on the waterfront. There’s an amazing amount of stuff crammed in there — maybe a little too much, in fact — and it could easily occupy an entire day. As it was, we ate a late lunch at a little café nearby on one of the squares which pepper the city and then headed back for a siesta.

In the evening it was out again for dinner. We had a couple of exorbitant drinks at a disappointingly dull basement bar called Les Gens Qui J’aime in L’Eixample, the upmarket area just north of the Barri Gòtic, and were, to be frank, a bit pissed off about it. Happily, the restaurant we eventually ate at later that night erased any ill feeling: Tapaç 24 is the best place I’ve eaten at in ages. It was bright and bustling, with a nifty typographic menu listing traditional tapas elevated just a little out of the ordinary either by great preparation or careful tweaking of an otherwise standard recipe. We ate mussels, a McFoie burger (this is what it sounds like, and what it sounds like is awesome), lentil and chorizo stew and a ‘bikini’, or croque monsieur, with truffle oil. We finished with xocolata — chocolate truffles served with olive oil and salt. I’m salivating even now as I write about it. The night was saved, and in spectacular style.

The rest of our time was spent in other similarly enjoyable pottering, eating and drinking. We took the train to the ancient Roman colony of Tarragona and spent an afternoon exploring the ruins; we ate a luxurious meal (and paid for it!) in the fin de siècle surroundings of Los Caracoles, or “The Snails”; we visited the Barcelona History Museum for more Roman’ around subterranean excavations; we sat fully clothed and out of place on the scorching sands of the beach, and we drank beers while the other tourists around us struggled with their absinthe, water and sugar cubes in Marsella, one of Hemingway’s favourite Barcelona hangouts. Leigh continued to awe me with her compendious knowledge of anything remotely historical, and through it all, of course, Ally G periodically popped up in his capacity of knowledgeable expat to show us around and provide much excellent chat.

After spending nine days there I couldn’t help but entertain the (entirely fastastical) notion of buggering off there to lead the dissolute life of a writer in exile. It was a great holiday!

After having spent Friday messing about on the water, Saturday was a designated drinking day. That afternoon Chris guided us to Brisbane’s West End, a cosmopolitan area with cocktail bars, tattoos and singlespeed bikes much in evidence, and we proceeded on a geographically short but alcoholically intensive pub crawl. We kicked things off with an excellent meal in a quiet music bar called Vinyl, then moved across the road to Archive, a so-called ‘beer boutique and bistro’, where we were intrigued to see a waitress working the floor while carrying an enormous tray of — well, of meat. A barman accompanied her with a book of raffle tickets. Chris nodded towards them.

“It’s the meat raffle,” he told us.

“Wait, what?” we asked him. Consternation reigned until the pair arrived at our table.

“What’s the meat for?” we asked him.

“It’s the meat raffle,” he told us.

“A meat raffle? A raffle for meat? But why?”

The barman was unperturbed by our obvious incredulity. “It’s the meat raffle.”

“Is it for a good cause?”

“It’s for meat.”

This stylish establishment might position itself as a high-concept ‘beer boutique’ but underneath the gloss it was Australian to the core: if you pricked it, did it not bleed Bris-bonian? If you tickled it, did it not emit a hearty belly-laugh and throw another shrimp on the barbie? We giddily bought tickets and awaited the draw, which we lost. I might have been disappointed had I not become quite drunk in the intervening period.

After Archive we decamped to the nearby Boundary Hotel to shout “Crossroads” at the resident blues band and finally pitched up at a decidedly slick cocktail bar named Sling. We sat outside and perused the menu. What would Don Draper do, I asked myself?

“An Old Fashioned! I must have an Old Fashioned,” I told everyone as I read the menu, “apparently with a Hand-Crafted Ice Cube.”

The waitress took our order.

“Can I have an Old Fashioned, please? And what’s so special about a ‘Hand-Crafted Ice Cube’?”

“I’ll ask for you,” she replied without a hint of irony. And so she did, returning five minutes later. “Basically the ice is purer than water, you see, and so, uh…and also they cut it to fit the glass.”

Miss, I wanted to say, miss, please. The purity of the ice is independent of the means by which it is shaped. Sadly, such a retort was beyond me at that point, not least because I was by now having difficulty forming basic words. “I’ll take one,” I managed instead. When it arrived, most of the glass’s volume was occupied by a monolithic, roughly sculpted cylindrical ice cube; the remainder was occupied by a cocktail not a million miles away from neat bourbon. It was anticlimactic, but in the spirit of the evening I knocked it back. We drank on, taking in stolid White Russians, kitch Tiki drinks and arty molecular cocktails as we ranged through the menu, and at a certain point a primitive survival mechanism clicked into action in my foggy head.

“Guys,” I said, “I have to go now. I’m absolutely hammered.”

I left them to it, taking a taxi home from the rank next to the bar. Finding the side door open, I crept stealthily through the garage and quietly called to Leyla (so as not to wake Scarlet) to let me into the house. I fell into a drunken slumber as soon as my head touched the pillow.

“You know when you came in last night,” Leyla said the next morning as I crawled downstairs with a raging hangover, “I’ve never heard anyone so loud in my life. You shouted ‘LEYLA! LEYLA!’ from the garage, worked out how to open the door yourself and slammed it behind you, then talked to me at full volume as I was trying to get Scarlet to sleep.”

Oops.

The next few days were necessarily low key. I borrowed Chris’ brother-in-law Darren’s bike for a couple of rides; we barbequed sausages on the deck, played cards and generally pottered around at a laid-back sort of pace. Then, in the middle of the week, Leyla took Doug, Davis, Scarlet and I to the South Bank on the site of the old Expo ’88. There’s an articifial beach and a paddling pool there, and after lunch we sat by the water to soak up the rays and make sandcastles with Scarlet.

Alongside the South Bank runs the Queensland Cultural Centre, an interconnected stretch of concrete edifices housing the State Library, the Queensland Museum, the Gallery of Modern Art and the Queensland Performing Arts Centre. In concept, it’s not unlike the gaggle of newer buildings clustered round Edinburgh’s George Square with their multi-level layout and hidden tunnels, but the experience of walking around the place could not be more different. Brisbane’s version is amazing: the concrete is broken up by lawns, trees and ponds, while airy passages cut through the buildings and seem to blur the distinction between inside and out through the use of consistent materials and clever layout. Key to it all, thought, is that the sunlight keeps everything warm, bright and inviting; much as I love the architecture in George Square, in this respect Brisbane has got it firmly licked.

That evening we chaps headed out once again, this time to Caxton Street, a diverse stretch of watering holes that encompassed fixie-riding hipster hangouts, multi-level sports bars and strip clubs. And reader, our evening would also take them in.

Things started off gently enough near Caxton Street’s eastermost extremity in a sprawling multi-level place called , before we headed out looking for some food. Aiming for the Barracks, a converted jail and army base, we gawked into the various restaurants available to us before Chris unilaterally decided on an outlandishly baroque-looking place called Libertine. What he said to us, in essence, was this: “We’re eating here. I don’t know anything about this place, what the food is like or how much it costs, but we’re eating here.”

Libertine, we found out, was a seafood-based French/Vietnamese restaurant with fairly lofty ideas about its station in life. After some horse-trading to manage the 50-50 seafood/you-must-be-joking split in the group, we ate an intriguing meal of soft-shelled crabs, foie gras and a variety of other tasty but challenging dishes. I don’t think I can say we enjoyed all of it, but at the very least it won our respect.

Next up was an Irish bar called Kitty O’Shea’s. We shouldn’t have bothered. The four of us found ourselves forming roughly half the audience of a dreadful ‘comedy’ show which started shortly after we arrived. Doug, Davis and Chris formulated a plan to escape this ghastly spectacle, sidling outside one by one ‘for a cigarette’. Unfortunately, they forgot to tell me about this plan, and so after ten minutes spent wishing quite specific forms of harm upon the performers, I turned round to find the three of them laughing at me through the window. I got up and left, making ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ gestures at the jokers on stage.

Having extricated ourselves, the night picked up. We crossed the road to a tiny coffee/cocktail bar called Cartel. I’m not sure how convinced the others were, but I could have stayed there all night: it had a relaxed indoor/outdoor layout, a decent selection of beers with a South American bent to it, and most importantly of all the toilet key was attached to a set of drop handlebars. (If you know me at all, you’ll understand that this discovery made my night.) From Cartel we hit Calypso just down the road for a jug of sangria (that’s how we roll, yo), which Chris lobbied the barmaid to have spiced up with extra brandy, and where he further endeared himself by haggling over the price and then accidentally smashing a glass on the floor. We drank more cocktails at two formidable multi-bars, the Caxton Hotel and Hotel LA, before finally wandering out into the night air and heading back down to Calypso for a nightcap.

Davis and I were about to cross the road to take a seat at an outside table, and waited for Doug and Chris — lagging behind to light a cigarette each — to arrive. They seemed to be taking an awful long time. As we watched they each took a final drag, stubbed out their cigarettes on the ground, turned around and walked straight into the only strip club on the street.

Oh balls, I thought.

Davis, to his credit, suggested that we get a drink and wait it out, so we crossed over and took a seat. Calypso had — rather unfortunately for a cocktail bar — run out of tequila, and so we ordered a pair of extravagantly gauche strawberry-flavoured cocktails while we waited for Doug and Chris to emerge. As our glasses neared empty, we saw them come out. They each lit up, smoked a cigarette, stubbed it out on the ground, turned around and walked straight back into club.

Oh balls, I thought.

We gave in. We paid for our drinks, crossed back over the road and went into the Velvet Cigar (yeah, you probably want to avoid that link if you’re at work) to find Doug and Chris deep in conversation with one of the strippers. The place was dark but not gloomy and had an unexpectedly upmarket feel about it — to call it ‘classy’ is probably going too far, but it did have a certain Moulin Rouge air which I suppose isn’t entirely incompatible with its primary source of income.

Davis and I walked over to them.

“Guys!” said Chris, then pointed me out to the girl he was talking to and declared: “This man hates strippers.”

And so I found myself plunged into a long, rambling conversation about strippers, strip clubs, moral relativism and my imperfect knowledge of feminism. Of course, at least one of us was sorting out another round at the bar this whole time, and so by the time the first girl had headed off to perform and been replaced by a Geordie physiotherapy student who found that stripping was an excellent way to support her studies, I was completely blotto. I tottered unsteadily back to the pool room near the entrance, collapsed into a high-backed armchair and attempted to focus on the game of pool being played by a hopeful punter and a visibly bored stripper.

When it became apparent to me that it was going to take a lot longer than I would have liked to sober up, I decided that it was time to call it a night. I walked back into the club proper, could not for the life of me find any of the other guys, and headed out the front door to find a taxi. The journey home was an exercise in restraint; restraint, that is, of the contents of my stomach, which were agitating for freedom. I got home to find all the doors locked and my phone gone from my pocket.

“Balls,” I said to myself. After a few minutes spent evaluating my options, I went down the outside stairs and collapsed on the hammock under the deck. An hour or so later I was woken up by the sound of Doug and Davis’ taxi pulling up. They found me in the hammock.

“Dude, you know there’s a spare key under the big plant pot on the deck, right?” asked Doug.

Christ, as Doug is wont to say in an Italian accent, Christ. What an evening.

I made a round of Skype calls the next day to try to find my phone. The first was to the taxi company, and was relatively straightforward (“Have you found my phone?” — “Sorry, no”) and the second was to the Velvet Cigar. I was in the downstairs bedroom and Skype was on speaker. The receptionist’s first, very loud question:

“Where were you in club? Did you have lap dance? Did you have lap dance?”

“No, I didn’t,” I told her. She didn’t believe me.

“Are you sure? Did you have lap dance? Did you have lap dance?”

I could have died. And they also did not have my phone. Le sigh.

We left a couple of days later, saying goodbye to Leyla and Scarlet at the house and Chris at the airport. It had been an amazing holiday, as much for the opportunity to see Charlie, Penny, Annabel, Alex, Chris, Leyla & Scarlet as it was for the chance to bask in the sunny, relaxed Aussie way of life for a few weeks. It’s wrenching each time we have to leave, and this time was no different. Thank you all for having us, and I can’t wait to see you all again!

The first couple of days were a gentle introduction to Chris & Leyla’s new house and the local neighbourhood of Everton Park. We climbed (comically and ill-advisedly) onto the roof to inspect Chris’ beloved solar panels; we walked down to the local creek to see a colony of shrouded, sleeping fruit bats hanging in their hundreds from trees on its banks; we drove to the local drive-through “bottle-o” and bought a “slab” of “beer”; we played cards and drank the aforementioned beer on the deck at the back of the house and gazed out over the leafy Brisbane suburbs.

Chris took Friday off work to take Doug, Davis and I for a day out to Moreton Island, a sand island a few tens of kilometres north-each of Brisbane. We caught a catamaran ferry over in the morning and came ashore at Tangalooma, an ’80s vintage holiday resort built on the site of the old Tangalooma Whaling Station. The only reminder of this gory history is the ‘flensing deck’ a concrete platform onto which whales were hauled for dismemberment, and which appeared to have been repurposed as a rain shelter for ping-pong tables. I wonder how many holidaymakers knocking a table tennis ball back and forth ever consider the slither and slap of blubber and viscera which would have rained upon them fifty years ago?

We walked further down the beach to rent a small metal dinghy along with some fins, snorkels and masks. A couple of miles down the coast were a series of ships which had been deliberately scuttled to form an artificial reef and we puttered off towards them with Captain Dave at the helm. From a physics point of view, our stubby little boat had a surfeit of rotational inertia and an unfortunately cylindrical hull section; from a physical point of view it teetered on the verge of capsizing all the time.

Move to the other side of the boat? Almost capsize.

Move the tiller? Almost capsize.

Twist the throttle on the feeble 4hp outboard? Almost capsize.

And so we pitched, bobbed and rolled the short distance to the wrecks like drunken sailors, finally flinging the anchor into the sea and coming to a more or less steady-state halt. One by one Doug, Chris and I leapt into the blue water — the boat threatening to turtle itself each time — pulled on our fins and masks and swam off towards the group of rusting hulks.

Snorkelling is, if anything, more difficult than scuba diving. When you have thirty feet of ocean above your head you make damn sure to keep your mouth clamped around the regulator, and with a ready supply of compressed air available to purge it or to clear your mask, any errant seawater is quickly dispensed with. With a snorkel, on the other hand, the natural reaction to an ingress of seawater — inhale briefly so you can blow it back out — only makes things worse. Not only that, but the simple act of looking to one side can plunge the tip of the snorkel underwater, and again, your next breath is more of a briny swallow. My progress was punctuated with great heaving gasps for air.

Even in broad daylight on a spring day, the wrecks were an eerie prospect. They sat at oblique angles, half exposed and half submerged with rusty spars and ledges jutting out here and there, and as we swam around them we could peer through hatchless openings into the silty darkness of their holds. I kept expecting some fanged aquatic beast to shoot out and rip us limb from limb. As it was, the marine life was plentiful but harmless: shoals of little fish darted around below us and kept out of our way as we occasionally dived down for a closer look.

We swam back to the dinghy (necessitating, of course, a large amount of pratting about in order to keep it right side up as we clambered in one by one) and returned it after a short jaunt back down the coast. We floundered around inexpertly as we beached, refloated and finally anchored it more or less where we picked it up.

The day brightened had up since we arrived and with some time left before the ferry departed for the mainland, we sat in the sun at a beachside picnic table, sank a few beers and talked bollocks until it was time to go. We sat up on the deck of the ferry for the return trip and I spread out contentedly on the plastic bench: my limbs were heavy from a welcome bit of exercise; my head was fuzzy from the sun and the beer, and my hair was thick with salt. Australia: actually quite good.

Friday was spent in gentle recuperation from the stresses of the gig but the day after that we piled into both cars for a trip down the Mornington Peninsula, the spit of land which forms the western boundary of Port Phillip Bay. After an hour or so in the car we turned upwards onto a zigzag, Alpine-style road leading up the slopes of a hill named Arthur’s Seat after a supposed (and to my eyes, wholly imagined) resemblance to the Edinburgh original. Charlie’s otherwise bulletproof Falcon felt just the slightest bit geriatric as we rounded each switchback.

We parked alongside Penny’s more athletic Camry (there’s something you don’t hear every day) and wandered out to the lookout point in the blazing sun. It was spectacular: we had uninterrupted views out over the pale blue water of the bay and unbroken sky, with the Melbourne skyline hazily visible to the north a full 60 kilometres away as the crow flies.

That afternoon we drove a few miles inland to a winery for lunch. There was a grassy slope and a sandpit round the back where Annabel could run joyously amok while the rest of us chilled out at a long table on the terrace and gazed out over the rolling countryside. Waiting for our food to arrive, Doug and I walked round to the cellar door at the front of the winery and proceeded to methodically sample each of the ten wines produced there; there followed a fairly outstanding meal and for me at least, a gratifying feeling of being on holiday at last. (I think for me it’s being half-cut at 2pm in the afternoon that does it.)

The festivities continued that night with our first official band night out in Melbourne. We grabbed a taxi to the CBD and followed Charlie through the bustle on the streets to a bar called Cookie. “I’ve been here before,” he said, “it’s great.”

The bouncer eyed us up as we approached. “Got a reservation, guys?” he asked.

“A reservation? For a pub?” Charlie replied with evident incredulity.

“Yup. It’s [inaudible] night tonight — look at all the other people. It’s the races.”

We did appear to be a little underdressed compared with most of the other revellers out that night. And whether or not this ‘reservation’ was just a ruse to keep four likely looking lads out of his bar or not, the bouncer had a point; the races in Melbourne go on all spring and this was clearly some sort of Big Night Out.

We wailed and gnashed our teeth and after consulting Doug’s iPhone went round the corner to Berlin Bar instead. This was to be our first encounter with Melbourne’s infatuation with theme bars, but this was no sloppily clover’d-up Jimmy O’Flanagans or Union Jack-bedecked Red Lion; this was instead a literal recreation of East and West Berlin circa 1984. The door was guarded by a buzzer system and pierced by a slit window through which the maitre’d could decide our worthiness to enter. We passed whatever test was silently administered by the fashionably quiffed (and drop-dead gorgeous) girl who answered the buzzer, and were then shepherded through the opulent ‘West Berlin’ room and into gritty ‘East Berlin’, decorated with ammunition boxes and anti-Soviet graffiti. We were worthy, but only just. Another startlingly attractive waitress took our order of four standard-issue but eye-wateringly expensive lagers. We clinked brand-specific glasses and got to it.

After Berlin Bar we trotted a few streets along to the Croft Institute, a three-storey, ceramic-tiled chemistry lab/hip hop club which served shots in plastic syringe plungers; we drank cocktails at Sweatshop, another hip hop place nearby (sadly, this one only really measured up to the others on the expense front), and lastly we descended on the magnificently pompous Melbourne Supper Club/Siglo, a pair of twinned bars sited respectively inside and on the roof of a grand old Victorian building. We shivered on the roof while drinking beers and eating meatballs — this was a night which needed some protein if it was to continue — and then descended to the warmer surroundings downstairs to drink whisky and rum. I was absolutely mortal, truth be told, but as is my custom I held it together and smiled wanly as the others blethered. Possibly the stand-out, jet-liquid-out-your-nostrils moment of the night happened just then, as a clot of braying, preppy 25-year-old guys at the table next to us started complaining loudly that their cheese platter was taking too long, and that they absolutely could not enjoy their Beaujolais Nouveau without it.

We caught a taxi home, tired, as they say, but happy.

On Sunday Doug and I caught the train to north Melbourne to meet up with Kristen and her boyfriend Steve (who we’d already met at the gig) for a barbeque at Steve’s place. We sat out the back in camping chairs and shot the breeze as we waited for sausages and kangaroo skewers to cook.

Doug had mentioned a few days before that Steve used to restore old American muscle cars for a living, and that he might just have a couple of works in progress on the premises for us to take a look at. My mind reeled at the prospect of getting up close to the coke-bottle curves of a General Lee-era Charger or a Plymouth Satellite or something equally exciting. “So, Steve,” I asked as casually as I could, “I hear you used to repair old cars for a living?”

“Yeah,” said Steve. “In fact, I’ve got a couple on the go at the moment in the garage if you’d like to see them.”

Yes, Steve. Yes I would indeed. Show them to me right now.

Steve rolled back the garage door to reveal — well, as Doug said later, it wasn’t quite the gleaming Mopar mecca we’d expected, but the cluttered garage had a charm all of its own. Two grimy white late ’60s cars — a Chrysler Valiant wagon a cut-and-shut Dodge Dart coupé, Steve told us — were crammed in side by side, the rest of the garage filled with sundry mechanical innards.

“I’ve got a Skyline engine waiting to go in the Dart,” Steve said.

Okay, now you’ve got my attention again.

We nerded out with some petrolhead chat until the food was ready, and after eating we headed inside so that Steve could educate us in the ways of the Melbourne music scene. Seemingly a bit of a renaissance man, Steve is the owner of Love & Theft Records, and as we blethered he trawled through his label’s back catalogue, putting on this vinyl or that CD. Doug told him about our abortive PR attempts with Triple R.

“That’s weird,” Steve said. “Normally if you pay three hundred bucks for an advertising campaign Triple R will play some of your music or get you on air for an interview.”

Coba Fynn: masters of the own goal.

Our last few days in Melbourne went by too quickly. Monday was taken up by a leisurely lunch in St Kilda followed by a little light boozing and some excellent funk music in Windsor that evening, and on Tuesday we again loaded both cars for a day trip down to Phillip Island, off the southern tip of the Mornington Peninsula. We took a walk along the scorching sands of Woolamai Beach on the southern edge of the island, and which, unprotected from the overwhelming expanse of the Pacific, gets some of the best surfing waves in Australia. For lunch we drove over to Cowes on the placid northern coast, and then, leaving Charlie & Penny and the kids to play on the beach, Doug, Davis and I commandeered the Falcon for a trip to a nearby Pirate Mini Golf course. How could we not?

“Anyone mind if I drive?” I asked as we finished our round. I gleefully helmed the Falcon for the 20-minute journey back to Cowes. Charlie, if you’re reading this, I must be honest: I hooned it just the tiniest bit. How could I not? I spun the wheels on the way out of the gravel car park and chirped the tyres as we turned out onto the highway, but that was the limit of my automotive abuse; for the rest of the drive I adhered to the internationally accepted speed limit of “as fast as the guy in front”.*

We rounded off our day on the island with a visit to the Penguin Parade. Each night at dusk, hundreds of Little Penguins come ashore after a day at sea and waddle up the beach to their burrows in the sand dunes above it. We watched this earnest little procession from boardwalks raised up off the beach in the dim light cast by ‘penguin friendly’ floodlights, wandering back to the cars when the last of the birds had scrambled up off the sand. We were all shattered, and I must admit that to a person, we forgot to heed the notices warning us to “Check under your cars for penguins!” before we set off home. Happily, though, no penguins we injured in the making of this entry.

Charlie ferried us to the airport the next morning. Annabel slept soundly in the child seat between Davis and I, waking only to wail inconsolably as we said goodbye at the airport kerb. We kissed her goodbye, man-hugged Charlie and set off for the flight to Brisbane.

* Australia still wholeheartedly embraces the sort of car culture which America seems to have forgotten. GM and Ford (who own Holden and Ford Australia) have abdicated this responsibility to their antipodean subsidiaries who manage to design and build mass market, rear-drive sedans powered by 4.0 sixes and 5.0 V8s in a country of only 22 million inhabitants, while in the USA only bit part player Chrysler can make a similar claim. I saw more ’70s iron with bonnet scoops and side exhausts in three weeks than I’ve seen in many months in North America. It’s enough to make me want to spend a gap year over here, if only so I can spend 12 months hooning an ex-cop Commodore SS around the outback.

Charlie picked us up at Melbourne airport on a Sunday evening and ferried us back to his house in Bentleigh, a genteel suburb south-east of Melbourne city centre. We sank some Tasmanian beer (James Boag’s, pronounced “bo-ag” if ever you have a need to confuse a Victorian) and a few shots of duty-free Talisker before heading to bed. I slept very well indeed, waking woozily only for a short time in the early morning to hear Charlie and Penny’s eldest Annabel getting ready for nursery. I went back to sleep.

Our first day was a quiet potter around a local suburb named Hampton. We ate lunch just off the main road (I had a salmon risotto which tasted a little curious — this becomes important later), afterwards wandering out to the nearby beach and then heading home so that Penny could collect Annabel. Davis rode along in Penny’s Camry while Doug and I climbed aboard Charlie’s venerable, sun-blistered Ford Falcon Futura to cruise home in ironic style.

I fell in love with this car instantly. It was a redneck bruiser, a lurching retro-tank with acres of space and buckets of character. There was paint peeling off the bonnet, tinting film peeling off the windows and the HVAC controls were off-limits (“if you’re driving this car,” Charlie said, “don’t touch the heating. Sometimes it just stops dead”), but a 4-litre straight six, rear wheel drive and a willing auto box go a long way to mitigating such piffling cosmetic issues. I had an absolute need to get behind the wheel.

Charlie tuned the radio to Melbourne’s local indie station, Triple R as we rolled down Hampton’s main drag. He had been conducting not a PR offensive but open PR warfare against Triple R: “I faxed these dudes a copy of our album cover about six times, with the words “Coba Fynn” written on each one in big black letters.”

He had, in addition, forked over $300 for a series of ten thirty-second radio spots in the days leading up to our imminent gig, and we listened eagerly for it during each commercial break. Charlie’s initial script for the advert had been a semi-random list of adjectives like ‘bombastic’, ‘tender’, ‘farcical’, ‘emollient’, ‘surprising’ and ‘bonzer’ (along with the rogue compound noun ‘idiot-savant’) culled from band emails, and had been soundly rejected by the station. If you listen to Triple R’s self-produced replacement you can quite clearly hear the laughter in the narrator’s voice.

Our advert was not forthcoming.

“I’m going to call them with a request,” Doug said.

I watched Doug in the massive fish-eye mirror that the Falcon’s previous owner had clamped over the standard one, and which gave a back-seat passenger a panoramic view of pretty much the entire world, as he dialled Triple R’s number on his phone. This is the conversation he had, word for word:

Doug: “Hi, is this the correct phone number to ask for requests?”

Triple R: “We don’t generally do requests, but what are you looking for?”

“Can you play something from the new Coba Fynn album?”

Suddenly firm: “We don’t take requests.”

“Okay, fair enough. Bye.”

Doug turned to Charlie and I.

“She knew exactly who I was.”

“Oh God,” I cringed. “They must hate us.”

That evening we drove the fifteen minutes to Jam Tin rehearsal studios, two converted industrial units in an anonymous estate off the Nepean Highway, for our first practice in almost a year. We were listed on a whiteboard on the way in as “Covasynn”.

Our room was indistinguishable from more or less every rehearsal room we’ve ever used: a large but past-it sofa upholstered in unfortunately absorbent fabric took up one wall; a mismatched, abused drum kit faced it and a complement of middle-of-the-road Marshalls liberally painted with the words “Jam Tin” completed the picture. The combined whiff of stale BO and air freshener added some olfactory authenticity. We were instantly at home.

With most of our gear still in the UK, Charlie had sorted us out with two Strat replicas and a Stingray bass knock-off, all sporting maple necks, black bodies and white pickguards, and all bought for peanuts at the local Cash Generator. Either they sounded great or we’re chronically unable to appreciate expensive musical instruments; either way, the old ‘Fynn sound was surprisingly audible in these hundred-dollar guitars and battered drum kit.

We broke for dinner a few hours into the practice. The only place open nearby was a Nando’s across the road, so in the Australian style we drove the hundred years to the car park, scarfed down chicken burgers and drove back to Jam Tin to finish the session. The practice had gone rather well, I thought, and with another six-hour block still to come the following night, things were looking good for Wednesday’s gig. Charlie ferried us home and we retired to our various pits.

…only for me to awake nauseous and sweating at around 3am. I clambered off the sofa where I was sleeping that night, stumbled into the bathroom and had only just made it to the toilet when I forcefully hurled the contents of my guts into it. Chiefly visible in the matter I had ejected was risotto rice and partially digested chicken. “Oh God,” I moaned. The sight and smell made me sick all over again. I clung to the porcelain throne with eyes watering and chest heaving for a few more minutes. Finally finished, I brushed my teeth, gulped down some water and collapsed back on the sofa, sleeping, more or less, until Annabel got up noisily around 5.30am.

The bulk of Tuesday was an unpleasant blur, a sort of movie nightmare sequence of tossing and turning and sweating and shallow breathing, lest I trigger the whole thing again. The guys were off out somewhere, so when I managed briefly to get up I sat with Penny and Annabel and baby Alex and tried not to breathe on anyone. Penny gave me an electrolyte powder to help get some water back into my system and by 5pm that day I was well enough to get up, shower and get ready for the practice. At 6pm we were back in the same room down at Jam Tin. I was still a little wobbly, but we managed to take care of the loose ends in our set, and more significantly I was able to hold down some Thai food from an unassuming but decent local restaurant.

On Wednesday, Doug, Davis and I occupied ourselves with a little light sightseeing (lunch at Federation Square and a visit to the observation deck of the Eureka Tower, a genuinely entertaining attraction which comes across as a little desperate to define its uniqueness — “highest public vantage point in a residential building in the Southern Hemisphere”) while Charlie worked. We had a beer in a Federation Square café but I was still suffering from yesterday’s travails and a single ‘pot’, or Aussie half-pint, was enough to send me home for the day.

Thursday, the day of the gig, was mostly spent practising, writing down makeshift set lists and picking up rental gear. Charlie was working again, but having met up back at his house we made it through the turgid rush-hour traffic and were unloading our hired amps at the Empress with a couple of hours to spare.

The Empress was a marginally grungy place composed of a bunch of knocked-through rooms on the ground floor of an old hotel. We set up and soundchecked on the crowded stage with our begged, borrowed and (possibly) stolen gear and retired to the dining room to await our hoped-for public. What with our radio ad, spruced-up website and Charlie’s hounding of his colleagues at work, we were expecting literally teens of people. I picked at my stringy steak sandwich without much enthusiasm; lingering rumblings in my stomach combined with acute nervousness to suppress my appetite.

Gradually people arrived: some of Charlie’s colleagues, Doug’s old housemate Kristen and her boyfriend Steve who happened to live in Melbourne, and my old workmate Sheena who even more coincidentally happened to be on holiday in Melbourne at the same time. With fans of the headlining band Paint Me A Phoenix arriving too, the room was reassuringly non-empty.

We took the stage at 9pm, strapped on our matching pawn-shop guitars and played. And when all is said and done, we played pretty well for a band ravaged by jet lag, food poisoning and the common cold. Granted, we were a little shambolic at times, but what’s a drumless verse or a fluffed bass line between friends? We finished with our first-ever live rendition of Whitechapel, a track of which I’m inordinately proud despite having nothing whatsoever to do with its composition, and it rounded off the gig magnificently. We came off stage and clinked glasses. Tour complete! Now the drinking could begin.

We turned off the péage near Bergerac and, after half an hour of missed turnings and conflicting directions, found the villa in nearby Lanquais. Tom, who had already arrived, showed us up to the terrace at the back and pressed glasses of Bordeaux red into our hands.

Before we could settle in to this rural French idyll, though, there remained the little matter of picking Josh up from Bergerac airport. A couple of oncoming cars had flashed their lights at us on the road to Lanquais, reminding us that the Alfa’s headlamps remained defiantly unconverted from UK spec, and with no desire to be lifted by the Gendarmerie on our first day here, I called Josh to tell him the bad news.

Here is how that turned out:

Still, that minor unpleasantness behind us (who am I kidding? I’ll be getting stick for that ’till the day I die), we settled in to enjoy our first evening. We ate baguettes and camembert provided by Tom, watched as the bats took flight from the eaves of a neighbouring house at dusk and generally relaxed. And then we got shitfaced.

The next day we headed out for a stroll around sunny Lanquais, taking in the ch
âteau and the nearby lake. We were chagrined to find out that the lake was dedicated to a “miniature port” and that swimming was not allowed.

“Why not?” someone asked.

“Because of the eels,” Devon replied. “Because of the electric eels.”

That afternoon we took both cars to a Carrefour on the outskirts of Bergerac to stock up on food for the week, only le supermarché était fermé because it was Sunday. Thwarted, we drove in convoy to a nearby McDonalds, ordered a perfunctory few items between us, propped open our laptops and basked in the glow of the complimentary wifi. Jeff and Josh checked their respective fantasy football teams; I checked the progress of the Vuelta a España and more or less everyone checked their work email accounts. Disconnection anxiety reigned, but hey; it was sunny, and even McDonalds is bearable in France.

Unable to feed ourselves, that night we had dinner at the Auberge des Marroniers, the surprisingly cheap and even more surprisingly excellent restaurant at the edge of the village. And then we got shitfaced.

The week meandered on in a similarly relaxing fashion. We visited local villages (Limeuil, Lalindes and St. Emilion) and towns (Bergerac and Bordeaux); we canoed down the Dordogne, hauling the canoes onto a pebble beach along the way to stop for a thirst-quenching beer; we shopped at open air markets, speaking broken French to bemused stallholders; we ate croissants for breakfast, read the International Herald Tribune, played pétanque, picked apples in the garden and lazed in the sun. We drank like alcoholics and ate like kings.

Life in the villa was so achingly French that from a dreich Edinburgh viewpoint it seems almost absurd. The house was the very image of a traditional French farmhouse, at least as it exists in the mind of a British tourist, and the village around it was sun-drenched, rustic and quiet. Eerily so, in fact — we barely saw any of the inhabitants from day to day, and the village shop’s shelves were almost bare. Presumably our daily order of croissants and pains au chocolat was enough to pay the no-doubt piffling French mortgage.

All in all, the holiday was very good indeed, and by the end of it we were already discussing plans for the next one. My only regret is that the €6, 5-litre plastic keg of wine that Josh and I fought so hard to get into Devon’s carefully curated shopping trolley during our first visit to Carrefour was carelessly left behind. I was distraught. C’est la vie, I suppose.

After checking out of the hostel we pottered into the middle of the old, walled town of Bruges. It was a lovely little place, full of well-restored older buildings (without internet access here in our villa in the Dordogne, I hesitate to guess at what period the older buildings are but I’ll plump for anywhere in the last 400 years) and well-architected new ones.

To me, the way that modern buildings had been integrated into the existing fabric of the town was as impressive as how well kept their older neighbours were. It seems to me that in Britain, shitty architecture in the middle of grand old towns is a given: buildings which are meant to blend in end up as lazy pastiches of the prevalent architectural style, and those ‘statement’ buildings striving to make a break from the past are boring, corporate sandstone monstrosities. In Bruges, though, modern buildings were either indistinguishable from their older neighbours, or were timeless enough to not embarrass themselves by standing out. Minimalist glass-and-steel cubes sat at ease in amongst centuries-old ornate stonework, and simple, modern shopfronts made for intriguing rather than incongruous additions to older buildings.

We ordered coffees and pastries at a swanky little café on a square of jewellery and couture shops. Our waitress, perhaps only 17 years old and already with near-perfect English, brought them to us at an outside table and we watched as the inhabitants of Bruges (Brogues?) went about their daily business. The striking thing was how healthy everyone looked: tanned, slim and generally good-looking, not to mention quietly well-dressed, if not quite so intimidatingly fashionable as in Italy.

Bicycles were everywhere, but the lycra monster/rusty MTB commuter split typical of the biking population of Edinburgh was nowhere to be seen. Here, almost everyone rode sit-up-and-beg Dutch city bikes in a very bof (or the Flemish equivalent) manner, trundling along at a dignified pace and chatting on mobile phones or smoking a cigarette. It was very, very civilised.

We pottered around for a while longer, taking in the leafy canals, narrow back streets and the intricately carved stonework which appeared here and there in the form of crests and gargoyles on houses and churches. The one fly in the ointment was the occasional waft of a vaguely sewage-type smell — another reminder of Florence, and apparently the price one has to pay for a well-preserved medieval town. Other than that, Bruges was a town for which the word ‘charming’ was invented. I’m tempted to make a return trip one of these days.

We loaded up the car and took our leave around lunchtime, heading out onto the motorway for the first long driving stint down towards Paris. There had been some discussion as to whether this was a good idea.

“Hell no,” I said.

“I’ve printed out a Google map with directions,” said Ash, and so in the absence of any better plan we decided to roll with it.

We hit the périphérique around 4pm and spent the next hour and a half in nerve-shredding nose to tail traffic, with motorbikes shooting past on the white lines with their hazards on and their horns blaring. Our first exit was closed by roadworks, the hard shoulder was littered with broken cars and at least one SUV trundled past in a tunnel with smoke billowing out from its engine bay. We’re going to become a tunnel fire statistic, I thought. British tourists perish in Paris traffic apocalypse.

After what felt like a complete orbit of Paris we found another exit and turned south towards Orléans. We arrived around 7pm, at the tail end of rush hour, and the streets were still clogged with cars. Roadworks on the way in threw us off track almost immediately, and after being funnelled all the way across town by the relentless traffic we capitulated and asked for directions at a nearby hotel. We found our own hotel (forming part of Orléans’ conference centre, as it turned out) without too much more fuss, but getting into it was another matter entirely. At every step there was a problem.

Gain entry to the building

The door is locked. Wave at another guest loitering in the foyer to buzz us in.

Find room key

Reception is closed. Follow another guest up to the second floor at the direction of the manager, who is providing instructions via the guest’s mobile phone. Enter a code (again provided over the phone by the manager) into a wall safe and find inside a bunch of envelopes with names and room numbers on them.

Park car

Find that parking garage is locked and that the room key and key fob do not operate any of the four entry systems on the wall beside it. Await egress of another car and drive craftily under the closing shutter. Drive two floors down to find a space reserved with the hotel’s logo.

Return to room

Call lift from garage. Find that lift cannot be called to this sub-basement floor. Take emergency exit stairs up two floors, noting in the process that every door onto the stairs has a blanking plate rather than a handle — once you exit, you can’t get back in — and exit at street level. Re-enter hotel via front door. Go to room. Collapse, mentally and physically exhausted.

We did nothing else that night. Orléans could suck it, for all we cared.

The next morning dawned a little brighter. Only one more day of driving before we got to the villa! Having packed up and tidied the room, we entered the Crystal Maze a second time.

Take lift to sub-basement level of parking garage

Enter lift and discover that the sub-basement button does nothing. Take the lift to the basement instead.

Take stairs to sub-basement level of parking garage

Exit the lift at the basement level, pass through the poubelles room and enter the emergency staircase. Descend one floor to the sub-basement level and pry open the handle-less door by fingertips under the door. Leave door ajar so that future fingertip gymnastics will be obviated. Reflect that perhaps parking is not included in price of room.

Leave the parking garage

Load up the car and drive up two floors to the exit. Discover that the four exit systems (still) do not respond to the room key or key fob. Press all visible buttons on all door-related systems. As a last resort, press the big red panic button attached to the door motor and discover that it is an emergency stop button rather than an emergency exit one.

Concede defeat and call for help

Reverse car away from door and park in nearest free space, which coincidentally is reserved for the “Président” of some construction company or other. Return to street level via the emergency stairs, find contact number at (still closed) reception and call for help. Occupy half-hour wait for weekend manager to arrive by ordering cappuccino at neaby tabac and realise that the staff are subtly mocking you by providing instead a latte with a massive dollop of squirty cream on top. Fume silently. Ignore Ash’s laughter.

Gently coerce weekend manager into releasing locked parking garage door

Accompany weekend manager on same odyssey to parking garage as undertaken earlier, with added complication of mistakenly entering a pitch-black room next to the poubelles with a locked door at the end. Try to suppress laughter as weekend manager fumbles with keys in the light from your phone’s screen and fails to unlock door, then retrace steps back to emergency exit stairs. Feign surprise when handle-less door off stairway is ajar. Try and fail to convince weekend manager that the car was not in fact parked in the Président’s space all night. Learn unequivocally that parking was not included in room rate (“This is not your parking place. We do not even do parking ‘ere. ‘Ow did you say you got into the garage?”). Wait for manager to release door. Drive off waving in a bemused touristic fashion. Thank your lucky stars you weren’t stuck in Orléans all weekend. Drive south very rapidly indeed.

We caught an overnight ferry from Newcastle to Ijmuiden in the Netherlands. The journey to Newcastle was uneventful enough, though I was fretting about having forgotten to buy a ‘GB’ sticker for the back of the car, and also about my failure to convert its headlamps for the continent. Standard-issue stick-on beam converters don’t work with the GTV’s projector headlamps, and despite having spent an hour under the bonnet trying to work out how the built-in beam converters operated we’d had to leave with them in an indeterminately continent-friendly state.

Things were looking bad a few hours into the voyage. Everything about The King of Scandinavia reeked of cut-price cruise ship. We grimaced through a perfunctory set of covers played by a group of wedding band refugees in the ‘sports bar’, rolled our eyes at the bingo which followed it and later ate possibly the most incongruously crap meal ever in one of the innumerable cafés on board. Having been ushered to a table by an officious, waistcoated waiter, we ordered. He bowed and recapitulated our order with excessive politeness.

“A hamburger and a Caesar salad, a Grolsh swingtop and a cider. Very good.”

The waiter left to deliver our order, Ash went to the toilet, and I twiddled my thumbs and played with my phone. The waiter reappeared a short while later, leaned over and presented a bottle of Grolsch and a bottle of Strongbow to me as if they were fine wines. He raised his eyebrows. Are these acceptable to sir?

I stared helplessly at him for a second. He was deadly serious. I nodded with what I hoped was an insouciant air. “They look fine.”

He cracked open each bottle and poured half a glass of each, then retreated busily to the entry to the kitchen and remained there to cast a beady eye over his customers. A short time later he returned to deliver our food.

Ye Gods, it was awful. You know how Pizza Hut fries its pizza bases to make them mouth-wateringly irresistible and yet simultaneously utterly repulsive? My burger bun had been similarly treated. Every mouthful was like a little death, a saturated fat-bomb of horror. Ash’s Caesar salad was rubbery and inedible. We choked back as much as we could stomach, paid the equally indigestible bill and got out of there. With hours still left of the evening, we drank on, listening to a variety of X-Factor rejects singing saccharine show tunes in the adjoining bar and eventually reeled back to our cabin in an alcoholic haze.

I awoke the next morning feeling unwell. Overnight the cabin had become (or so it seemed to me) stuffy and airless. I tossed and turned, the vibration of the engines and the gentle rolling of the ship reverberating through the bed and communicated directly into that part of the brain which controls hangovers. I don’t think I’ve felt quite so wretched in a long time.

I had a shower, mouth-breathing heavily and clinging to the provided ‘oh shit’ handle the entire time.* Ash was buoyantly unaffected by the night’s boozing. I hated her.

Once in the car, waiting on the car deck to unload, I rolled down the window and lolled out of it like a happy dog on a motorway, only with the attendant happiness or the tongue-flailing wind to cool my fevered brow. There was some delay with unloading — the rumour was that a doctor had been called to a medical emergency somewhere ahead of us — and I thanked my lucky stars that someone had had the decency to suffer a cardiac arrest or to fit uncontrollably.

Some time later, engines started up ahead of us and cars began to roll out into the morning light. I fired up the Alfa and followed them out. I felt no better than I had done when I awoke, and even the negligible effort of depressing the clutch and working the gearshift sent pulsating waves of nausea radiating out from my stomach. We trundled down the ramp and into the queue for the passport control.

I rested my head on the cold glass of the driver’s side window. “Oh God,” I complained to Ash. We inched forward in the queue. Then, all of a sudden, I was overcome with an urge to…well, to vomit. I pulled open the seasickness bag I’d brought with me from the cabin in a prescient moment.

“Ash, can you hold the wheel? I’m going to blearrrrgh,” I said.

The next few minutes were indescribably humiliating. I was hunched over the wheel, hurrrrgarrghing my guts up into a seasickness bag and attempting to creep the car forward with my feet as Ash steered and laughed at my misfortune all the while. Passengers in parallel queues goggled at the spectacle.

I composed myself in time to reach the border post where the Dutch policeman manning it approached the passenger side window to collect our passports. At that moment, as my acrid breath was safely contained on the other side of the car, the prospect of a thousand mile drive on the wrong side of the road was diminished somewhat.

We drove to Amsterdam, got lost in the fiendish one-way system and gave up, aiming for Bruges (and our hotel for the night) instead. Arriving in Bruges, we got lost in its fiendish one-way system, asked for directions (“you’re best to leave the city and then come back in along this other road”), ate a vastly overpriced meal at a tourist trap restaurant on the market square and went straight to bed. Go directly to bed, I thought. Do not pass ‘Go’.

* One of my Dad’s favourite anecdotes is that aboard the oil tankers on which he used to work, the handles bolted to the walls of the toilet cubicles to help steady oneself in the event of inclement weather were called “straining bars” by the crew.