Recipefiesta

The French cities of Marseille, Aix, Avignon and Arles boast a wealth of museums and festivals showing work by contemporary artists. Here’s how to make the most of a dazzling cultural summer

My wife and I moved from London to Marseille a little over five years ago when our British passports still conferred “right to reside” in France. That first winter on the beach, in short sleeves, as our daughters played in the topaz-coloured Mediterranean and the sun set across an ever-clear blue sky, I understood why this part of southern France has always been popular with artists.

I was recently speaking about this with the painter Fanny Nushka and her sailor husband, Benoît Bouchet, on the terrace of Café la Muse in Marseille’s “coolest” neighbourhood. She said: “It took a long time to go back to blue. It’s like being in Paris and painting the Eiffel Tower. It’s dangerous to paint the Calanques [limestone coves] as an artist from here.”

Mindful of steep airfares and global uncertainty, more and more UK holiday-makers are staying close – very close – to home. Does this mean Milton Keynes is the new Malaga?

Name: Micro-staycations.

Age: New.

Can a long road trip work with children? I set out to relive a classic journey from Bilbao to Saint-Malo I did in my freewheeling 20s

The moment came on about day four. A cloud-like mist was drenching our faces, hair and clothes, despite the thick canopy of trees overhead. My six-year-old daughter silently trudged uphill pushing her bike, her mouth set in a grim line. I looked again at the blue blob on Google Maps, which seemed, unfeasibly, to indicate we were on the right path. I thought, again, about the diminishing supply of chocolate in my backpack.

“See! I told you! We’re having an adventure,” I said with forced jollity. She didn’t even look up.

She came directly up to me and offered the tray, accompanied by a torrent of incomprehensible Greek

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

The straps of my backpack dug hard into my shoulders as I trudged like a zombie through the sweltering heat. I was hitchhiking across the Greek island of Crete in summertime and had been dropped off in a small village miles from anywhere, hoping to pick up my next ride. It was 1978 and probably didn’t help that I looked every inch the hippie – jewellery, bushy beard and dusty clothes.

Cars passed only infrequently, maybe one every half hour. When they did, they hurtled past like unstoppable express trains, without a sideways glance my way. I took a seat on a low stone wall and hoped for the best. But after several hours under the relentless sun, I was beginning to think I’d never get out of the place. A few houses dotted the main road but the village seemed to be asleep.

A 1,600-mile journey to the wild peaks of Scotland, via Llandudno’s Victorian promenade and the bright lights of Blackpool proved an eye-opener in more ways than one

One of my favourite recent photographs is of me (unusually), perched on the bonnet of our car, about to set off on a solo, two-week road trip from our Sussex home to the wilds of Scotland, taking in Eryri (Snowdonia), Lancashire, the Lake District and Yorkshire. I had no idea that the research trip I was about to embark on – for my book, which traces the story of British holidays over 400 years – was going to reveal my homeland as somewhere I barely knew.

As a southerner, it was the northern half of Britain that I needed to discover. I’d stitched together my route with visits to museums, archives and classic seaside resorts that had once blazed so brightly. I’d visited Cumbria before, but the Conwy coast, the Lancashire countryside, Blackpool, Morecambe, Scarborough? All these were unknowns.

From underfloor heating to big screen TVs, there seems to be nothing in the average house that isn’t available in one of these uber-vans

Our maiden campervan trip, 2021, and my wife and I return from Kata Tjuta to Yulara’s “Ayers Rock” campground to find new neighbours. Towering beside our humble rental is a fully optioned monster ute with a spanking new off-road caravan. And a playpen.

We’re enjoying a sunset dinner outside when a woman lurches down the steps next door cradling a chihuahua. Scowling at us, she drops the dog in the playpen and hauls herself back inside. The dog snarls and yaps until we hastily finish eating and retreat into our tiny van.

I found cinematic landscapes, wild freedom and thousands of miles of perfect solitude on my campervan adventure through the Nordic countries

It’s midnight, in June. Powder pink and dark grey clouds drift across a pallid sky, the palette reflecting in the motionless water of Lake Inari. Islets of pine and just-budding birch create pools of distorted shade close to the horizon of this 420 sq mile (1,080 sq km) lake in Lapland, northern Finland. There is not a sound. It’s so silent, I barely breathe to avoid disturbance. Only me, the lake and a moonbeam-coloured moth, whose wingbeat is inaudible.

I am sat beside my car-sized campervan, with mesmerised reverence for the rose-tinged panorama. I do not wish to go to bed and miss this moment. And I am loving the wild freedom and deliciousness of being entirely alone, with nobody in the world knowing my exact whereabouts. Ordinarily, I would be long asleep by midnight, exhausted after a day of work and family life. But I have left my husband and (adult) children at home in England for an eight-week solo camping adventure through Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway, with the singular aim of reaching Nordkapp (North Cape) and Knivskjellodden, Europe’s northernmost point at the top of Norway, in time for midsummer.