SCENES FROM A TRAVEL-WRITER'S LIFE...

There I was on the terrace of Pienza’s finest hotel, a glass of chilled wine in one hand, a bowl of succulent olives by the other, staring contentedly at a Tuscan landscape of overlapping hills, fading in the dusk from golden to lavender, and of cypress trees standing like sentries along chalky paths to honey-stoned farmhouses. I could have been looking at a painting, a living canvas. That was until a cluster of chatting Americans walked into my picture and stopped to admire the same view, leaving me to admire their middle-aged bottoms. I bet Canaletto never had to put up with that...

I peered nervously into the blue water as the words of our snorkelling instructor rang in my ears: " . . . and don't worry about reef sharks," she said. "They rarely attack people". That word "rarely" seemed quite important.

Clearly the pretty woman next to me felt the same. "Honey," she said, touching my knee, "I don't give a rat's butt what that lady said about nursing sharks being tame an' all - if I see one, I'm out of there."

Here I was, alone, on my first morning at a Club Med 'adults-only' resort. I was going snorkelling, the sun was shining, and already a woman in a yellow bikini had her hand on my knee. "I'm sure you'll be all right," I said huskily, not wanting her to think I was the sort of man who would be back in that boat faster than you could say Mark Spitz if he so much as glimpsed a grey fin...

My wife took to skiing instantly. With knees bent and arms outstretched as if embracing an invisible lover, she'd disappear over the brow of a slope, leaving behind a snake-trail in the snow and a husband as steady as a giraffe on stilts. I worried our relationship would suffer. We were just married yet already drifting apart, she downhill, me into the orange safety cones. It's not that I minded her being better than me - someone in a relationship has to wear the salopettes - but surely the vow to stand by your man implies a promise to fall over by him as well so he doesn't look quite so daft...

In the opening pages of Ian McEwan’s novel, On Chesil Beach, its two central characters are worrying about their wedding night. Edward and Florence, married earlier in the day, have driven to a small hotel on the Dorset coast and are now dining in their private rooms. They are both virgins – this is 1962, some time before the Sixties began swinging and people learnt to voice their intimate feelings – and the air is thick with tension. One has conventional first-night nerves, the other a more deep-rooted dread – “a helpless disgust” of

what will take place after dinner...  

I barely noticed the tree stump. The wood was grey with age and creepers snaking around its base were dragging it back into the rainforest. Then I saw a sign, half-hidden in the undergrowth: on this stump Allied prisoners of war were beheaded by their Japanese captors. I looked closer. The surface was scored with several deep groves...