It started with an email, just one line. It was the attached picture that did the talking. A lake, surrounded by rocky peaks iced with snow, its water an indescribable kind of blue, or maybe aquamarine, mixed with milk, and electrified. The question needn’t actually have been written, it hung in the air, blew coolly off the screen, 'Shall we try to find it?' ...

This is a post I really should have written long ago, by which I don’t intend anything cryptic, only to say that it contains the stories of over a year ago, crowded out at the time, first by a slew of Venetian festivities, then an avalanche of Japanese novelty. Between the two, this quiet little trip got lost in the middle… Then it was spring, and this mid-winter story seemed out of time ...

Rome – the Eternal City – has seen it’s fair share of New Years. For some of the city’s buildings, the Pantheon, the Colosseum, midnight tonight sees them closing in on their 2000th turn around sun. Romans then, more than most, cannot be said to be short on experience when it comes to heralding in the New Year. So what are their age-old traditions, the time honed charms guaranteed to bring forth luck, happiness, prosperity? Committed as I currently am to living the adage, ‘when in Rome…,’ I was intrigued to know, ready to follow instructions to the letter…

I was recently struck by the thought that some places manage to wear their clichés a lot better than others. It was a crisp yet sunny autumn morning (our first cliché) when the idea occurred, and were on our way from Rome to Tuscany, shunning the main roads, of course, for those ‘lesser travelled'...

High heat, high sun, high times, high summer – the best part of the year! Ten years ago exactly, on a heat-wave week like this one just past, we arrived in London from Australia and wound our way into town underground. At 5am we emerged into already bright sunlight from Clapham Common tube. It was a ‘short walk’ to the house of a friend, or so she had told us, but with all our worldly possessions on our backs, and a chunky IBM laptop bag wearing a hole in my shoulder (no Macbook ‘Air’ back then!), it didn’t feel so ‘short,’ and so we found ourselves, while trudging, with plenty of time to reflect on other instances we’d been led astray by her characteristic optimism! ...

The first day of Summer in Venice marks the beginning of high season, and although the city is almost never short of visitors, things step up a gear with the arrival of warmer weather. In the narrow streets and lanes, tourist throngs noticeably thicken, the pace at which it is possible to walk grinds often to a single file shuffle, and the sound of clattering wheelie bags (the greatest blight of all!), carries readily up through windows left open to the warm air.

Just a few miles north across the lagoon however, a forty-five minute vaporetto ride from the packed pavements and touristy gelaterie of the Fondamenta Nuove, lies an entirely different Venice, a Venice of tiny far-flung islands, and one that very few of the city’s millions of tourists take the time to see…

Over the course of an average winter, the mountains of Hokkaido will be blanketed with an astounding fifteen metres of snowfall. Every year, a three-storey building worth of snow! The storms that deliver this load gather above the freezing flatlands of Siberia, and rumble dryly eastwards, building in intensity across the tundra, until they arrive at the Sea of Japan. Here, the clouds pick up water, become slow and heavy, then, suddenly, POP! Pierced by Hokkaido’s high westerly peaks, they burst like overstuffed down pillows, sending their contents whirling downwards in a shower of fluffy white ...

Rush hour on a Friday evening, and the five shores of Tokyo’s famous Shibuya Scramble Crossing are brimming with pedestrians. Tick, tick, tick, the signal counts down slowly as traffic from all sides comes to a halt. Then, suddenly, the ticks are rapid, and whoosh – waves of people spill into the crossing from every direction as if carried on a tide. In the centre, where the tides meet, a carefully choreographed scramble takes place, thousands of bodies performing quick crab movements – side step, forward, to the other side – skittering over tarmac like hard-packed sand ...

“On Comet, on Cupid, on Donner and Blitzen!”

There’s a second half to this feast, so it’s back to the kitchen –

Six more festive things to put on the table,

But before we do so, an ending to our high-water fable …

It is midday on a Sunday in the busy market town of Maussane-les-Alpilles. Scanning the crowded central square, we are hoping to quickly spot the man we are here to meet. A man we are not here to meet is Jean Reno. ‘But, he sits with us, just over here!’ our actual target, duly found, entreats us in thickly accented English. ‘Come and say bonjour to Jean!’ ... 

Shadows are short in the noon-day desert sun, and the horizon thick with heat. In the distance, always just-out-of-reach lagoons emerge and evaporate in a mirage of blues, slivers, and even purple. Many millennia ago, the desert valley of Wadi Rum was not a valley at all, but a cayon-ed seafloor covered by leagues of water. The water is no longer, but I suspect little else has changed. The silence is as thick as water, and the heat as heavy. All around, stillness, immutability – a landscape seemingly unmarked by the passage of time…

We are sitting on the shaded terrace of Ca’ Vignotto, the only restaurant on the Venetian island of Sant’Erasmo, about to enjoy a three-course lunch of artichokes. Originally, the courses had only numbered two – a marinated artichoke antipasto to start, followed by a penne pasta with artichoke, but the waiter remained there looking confused after we’d finished ordering. ‘You are not also having the carciofi in tecia?’ he inquired. ‘It’s what people come here for!’ And so a third course of pan-cooked artichokes was added to the already thistle-laden feast...

A sashimi breakfast at Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji fish market sounded like a good idea. I’d get up early, wander the stands, take some pictures, generally work up an appetite, and then sit down to eat what may arguably be some of the very freshest sashimi on earth. But, as it turns out, a morning of looking at fish, breathing-in a miasma of fish, even being splashed unexpectedly with flying bits of fish, does not an appetite to eat that very same fish make!

To say that things get ‘lost in translation’ in Japan is an understatement. And, more to the point, implies that there is an attempt at translation being made in the first place. Travelling in some of the lesser-touristed parts of Southern Japan for instance, where an English menu is just not on offer, and an English speaking restaurateur nowhere to be found, means sitting down to eat without any of the usual choices, expectations, descriptions, or explanations. Which, as it turns out, was actually quite enlightening. (Though I am not telling the entire truth here concerning translations, they were to be found very occasionally. One ‘English’ menu included, for instance, ‘Hail clothes deep frying of the Japanese icefish.’ Intriguing, but not necessarily helpful!).