"My favourite holiday”

Our favourite writers share their treasured memories

Robert Crampton: Crete

Check out those ultra-short shorts! 
The radioactive tan! The bouffant hair with a suspicion of highlights! It was the summer of 1990, but the Eighties were clearly alive and well in the Crampton style book, unamended since the Wham! heyday, circa 1984. And yet that holiday – nothing special on the surface, a standard fortnight of sun and sand in the Med – in many ways did mark the end of the Eighties for me, and the beginning of a much happier decade. No disrespect to Crete, but that happiness didn’t have much to do with the island, and everything to do with the woman, then my girlfriend, now my wife, sitting next to me. I’d graduated the year before and was struggling to get a start in journalism. Nicola had been working in the City for several years. So she paid – always a plus.

We were 26 and had been going out for about four months. Crete was our first holiday together, initiated and organised by her, as almost all our holidays have been since. A first holiday may not make a couple; it can certainly break one. Ours was a triumph. I remember thinking: here’s a woman not averse to pootling around an ancient ruin or two, but also one unafraid to pronounce them deadly dull when she fancied the beach. And she seems to have picked up a smattering of Greek from somewhere, which is impressive. And although the barman is attempting to flirt outrageously, she’s not responding. 
Or only a bit anyway. And she’s a pretty outstanding drinker. All to the good. My clearest memory though, is of walking on the beach one night and being stalked by a couple of large, loud dogs. Nicola is not a fan of dogs, particularly large, loud ones. She was frightened and clearly expected me to be, too. But I’d got a bit of Dutch courage, and I like dogs, and anyway, I could see that this pair posed no threat. Rather, they presented a golden opportunity sent down to me by the Greek gods from Olympus itself. More by luck than judgment, I grabbed the animals by the scruff, tugged them away a few 
feet into the gloom and, issuing dire threats (while simultaneously giving them a good tickle, but Nicola couldn’t see that) sent them on their way.

You don’t get these chances very often. When you do, they must be seized. She was well impressed.

Robert Crampton is a feature writer and columnist for The Times

Wendy Holden: South of France

I’m a creature of habit, but some of my habits are extremely pleasurable. Such as my trip to the South of France every May. My love affair with the Riviera began in the 1980s, when my boyfriend (now husband) went to teach in Cannes as part of his French degree. (It was either that or Vladivostok, as he was studying French and Russian. Not a difficult call to make, really.)

We always travel there by train – it’s a wildly romantic journey from London to Paris and on to Antibes. Between trains, we always stop for a drink at the restaurant Le Train Bleu in the Gare de Lyon. It’s got some of the naughtiest ceiling paintings I’ve ever seen – you look right up people’s skirts.

In Antibes, we’ve been renting the same place for years, a tall town house in the Old Town, handy for the beach and restaurants. We love to walk around the harbour – the superyachts all have awful names like Bottoms Up.

When we leave Antibes we go to places like Nice, where we adore Chez René, a socca restaurant in the Old Town. The waiters are rude beyond belief but the food is divine. One of the best restaurants on the coast is up in the hills behind, in the village of Biot, where the Hôtel des Arcades spreads tables out under the main square’s ancient arches. They serve tastebud-exploding traditional Provençal food: stuffed courgette flowers in tomato sauce and their specialty, nude ravioli(you’ll have to guess!).

Otherwise, the best place to eat is La Colombe d’Or in St Paul de Vence. It’s the perfect stop-off after a visit to the wonderful Fondation Maeght, a shrine to modern art just outside the village. Writing about this has made me desperate to go back now, this minute – where’s my passport!

Wendy Holden’s new novel, Marrying Up, (Headline Review, £12.99) is out now

Tasmina Perry: Hawaii

A home exchange may not be everybody’s idea of a relaxing holiday, but when the offer of a swap three years ago was our London house for an oceanfront pad in Maui, my husband John and I couldn’t book our plane tickets fast enough.

It’s a long way to go to the Hawaiian Islands, particularly with a three-year-old; and by the time you get there, the last thing you feel like doing is driving for 52 miles. But what a drive; rainforests that run down to the ocean, waterfalls a stone’s throw from the road, fields the bright green of lime juice and flowers the bold scarlet of a traffic light, while the air is so scented it’s as if you’ve fallen into a bottle of perfume.

Our destination was Hana. Population 709. There’s one general store, a luxury hotel and not much else. But you don’t come to this part of the world to shop or spa. In fact, you don’t really come to do anything at all, except relax and soak up the sights and sounds of nature.

At first I was shell-shocked. I usually cram as much into one week as possible, but within 48 hours we were having a holiday in the truest sense of the word. 
A break from the world, in a place that felt as if it was at the end of the world.

We settled into a simple, stress-free routine. We’d buy our breakfast, fresh papaya and pineapple, from the fruit vendor opposite our house. Then we’d read under a huge banyan tree and watch our little boy, Finlay, collect apple-bananas and mangoes. There were just a couple of places to eat in town, so we did as the locals do – wander around looking for a barbecue in someone’s front garden and pay five bucks for an all-you-can-eat Hawaiian experience.

In the afternoon we’d horse-ride along the coast or head to the beach; within a five-minute drive there are golden ones, black volcanic ones and our favourite – a glorious secret cove with a natural lagoon where the sea is so smooth it looks like a sheet of jade.

Most tourists don’t come to Hana, and 
if they do it’s a day trip. We did it the other way around – 14 days on the remote Maui east coast, then our last day in the chi-chi honeymooner town of Wailea. And yes, the hotels and beaches were beautiful there, but compared to the tranquility of where we’d stayed, it might as well have been Blackpool.

And that was the beauty of the exchange – going to a place we otherwise wouldn’t have and then really getting under it’s skin. It will always be our perfect pocket of paradise.

Tasmina Perry’s new novel, Private Lives (Headline Review, £14.99), is out this summer

Tom Hodgkinson: Lundy

I can say with absolute certainty that my favourite holiday was a recent week spent on Lundy Island. The first advantage of this fascinating island is that it is very near where I live on the North Devon coast. I’m not much of a traveller, and with three young children, the prospect of a foreign holiday involving long waits in sterile airports, does not appeal much. Travelling to Lundy, on the other hand, is a simple matter of a half hour drive to the Victorian coastal resort of Ilfracombe, followed by a two-hour ferry ride on the charming MS Oldenburg, built in 1958 and still boasting brass fittings.

The travelling part, then, is not only stress-free but positively enjoyable. Our party, consisting of nine children and four adults, ate bacon sandwiches in the hold, played cards and stood out on deck to watch the three-mile-long island slowly come into view.

And what a beautiful island it is. Its coastline teems with seals, and its northern cliffs are home to colonies of puffins and guillemots. Indeed, ‘Lundy’, we are told, means ‘puffin island’ in Norse. Lundy is virtually car-free: only the odd Land Rover disturbs the calm, and I’ve never counted the Land Rover as an ordinary car: it seems to exist in a vehicular class all of its own, where the normal rules of seatbelts, functioning electrics and a tidy interior do not apply.

Accommodation on Lundy is from the excellent Landmark Trust, which manages the island and its properties. Our home for the week was Millcombe House, a grand manor built in 1835. The décor was absolutely up my street: dark furniture, black floorboards, Persian rugs and old prints on the wall. As well as Millcombe, which sleeps twelve, there are smaller cottages and you can even stay in the lighthouse buildings.

From Millcombe House it is a short walk to Lundy’s pub, the Marisco Tavern. There is much history to discover: I am told that the island was occupied for a short time by a bunch of Barbary pirates in the 17th century.

On our trip, the gang of children in our party was the dominant force, and they loved the freedom they had to wander up to the pub unaccompanied, buy Irn-Bru and play darts. Over the week we also climbed down cliffs and swam in the sea, went up 
the lighthouse, picnicked by the remains 
of crashed aircraft and explored caves and castles. Lundy is truly a haven of liberty.

Tom Hodgkinson is the founder and 
editor of The Idler. Brave Old World (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99) is out now

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