JOURNAL

A salty-aired fishing town on Ireland’s southwest coast, Dingle punches above its size when it comes to cultural happenings. It’s also the jumping-off point for one of the country’s most epic drives, an Atlantic-hugging loop that takes in hairpin bends, 5,000-year-old sacred sites and even a Star Wars location.

When you travel, do you often find yourself eager to document and collect as you go? Well, I do, and I am sure many other journaling enthusiasts, devoted scrapbookers and committed travellers do too. The whole movement towards collating seems to have reached a new fever pitch. What was once seen as kitsch is now cool again, and I for one am ecstatic to witness the comeback. It’s the eagerness to save memories, to treasure a particular moment and make it eternally represented through a miscellaneous, often completely taste-less object - and yet absolutely of that place and time.

Newcastle Upon Tyne is a city inundated with stereotypes. There’s it's dazzlingly wild and raucous nightlife to it's absurd number of Greggs serving sausage rolls and steak bakes. It’s a place whose name is synonymous with football. On game day, we turn the Toon into a parade of black and white stripes. The unapologetically loyal league of Magpies will flock into The Trent House two to three hours before kick-off to take to their pre-ordained seats. The conversation flows but will always resort back to reminiscing about the good old days when Shearer wore the number 9 on his back and to 1955 when the Geordies last took home the FA cup.

This year, we're aching for more travel. More experiences. More joy. There's so much to see and so much to do that we often have a hard time making decisions. Is Siwa up next or will we be heading to Mount Mtatsminda?

For New Zealanders like me, winters can be of the snow-globe variety. Magical and cosy but sometimes a little too insular, leaving locals itching to head beyond the perimetre of mountains.

Anywhere that’s described, fairly or not, as a ‘playground for the rich’ makes me want to avoid it like the plague. It conjures up images of excess, of flashiness, of a lack of consideration or rootedness in reality that leaves a bad taste. I don’t need to point fingers.

I always considered myself a lover of silence. The silence that lets you forget everything —when, just for a moment, you feel like the world exists only for you. The silence of a calm morning, just before the daily commuters awake. The silence of night when the last lashes flutter closed. I was yearning for these small moments of tranquility in between the chaos.

When I hear the opening bars of 'Color Song'—the cicadas creaking in the background—I find myself looking out over the thick green canopy of Sri Lanka’s Southern Province, enveloped by the sounds of the jungle and Maggie Rogers’ first EP that played on repeat during my first trip here.

Driving through the soft, rolling hills, the remnants of a cool desert morning still clinging to the breeze, I’m struck by the familiarity of it all. It’s as if I’ve wandered into a scene from an old film—a 70s road trip movie, soundtracked by the lazy buzzing of love songs from the radio.

The whitewashed buildings of Santorini, the acclaimed island of Skopelos, the long, crystalline beaches of Naxos and the cliffs of Sarakiniko in Milos are iconic, yes, I can’t disagree with that. Indeed, the Cyclades are indisputably sun-kissed and begging to be explored. But, as corny as it sounds, they are not my “home away from home”. I can’t readily recall that ever-so strong smell of thyme and sage, that familiar buzz around the harbour or the ridiculously loud hum of crickets. Is this due to the ever-apparent summer-time tourists? Or the fact I don’t have the familiar faces of fishermen, chefs and locals to holler “yasas” to on my arrival? Whilst there is always the smattering of new faces, when we arrive on Halki, the smallest island in the Dodecanese, we are greeted as old-friends. Gerald Durrell iconically spoke of his time in Corfu, where “each day had a tranquility a timelessness about it so that you wished it would never end.” This is the sensation I have when I arrive on Greece’s unsung hero, Halki. It's a place where I can slip into island life with all too much ease.

There used to be a pretty annoying advert on the TV a long time ago with the main protagonist, a radio DJ, singing this famous song ‘Maybe It's Because I'm A Londoner’. At the time, I hated it and thought the whole thing was incredibly naff.

Our recent jaunt to France was organised on a total wing and a prayer. In a distinctly out-of-character moment, I—of the most painstaking, forward-planning, rigorous research and meticulous holiday management—found myself saying to my husband, “There are cheap flights to Marseille on BA; let's book them and figure out the rest afterwards.” (With four children that all need their own seat on the plane, the flights have become the thing that dictates the destination.)

I used to spend a lot more time alone in the city. In my twenties, I would hop on the train and take it up to San Francisco. I'd sit by the window, preferably on the right side of the train and always somewhere in the middle of the train car. The train would pass by all the cities I grew up knowing from a distance, stretches of strip malls and homes and abandoned industrial lots seamlessly blending into each other. It was comforting.

As soon as parenthood hits, life changes. Your time is not yours anymore; your life is no longer just about you and your job and your partner and your travels. No, your world turns on its head and becomes something bright and beautiful and new.

Natural wine this, natty wine that, but what exactly is it? And where can you find the best of the best? Read along as we delve deeper into the world of this trendy, biodynamic and, well, extremely delicious beverage.

Whenever and wherever I travel, I always find myself accompanied by one persistent companion: my future self. That eulogistic narrator who speaks of those days—these days—before the trip expiry even hits.

When I was in the office at Condé Nast Traveller, we had weekly features meetings where we would kick around ideas about the dreamiest, most off the beaten track, undercurrent, undiscovered or even right-there-in-plain sight places around the world to write about.

It happens every year, sure, but somehow it never gets old. April 27th. King's Day. In our opinion, one of the best days of the year.

For me, any trip to the Balearics starts with a blank Word doc (or until a few years ago, a pale-blue, wafery page of my beloved Smythson diary) populated with the dates of travel, to be filled in, purely, thrillingly, with restaurant reservations.

Athens hadn’t always appealed to me. I was underwhelmed by my first visit there as a teenager. Expecting a grand, historic city like Rome, I was confronted instead with rows of grey, brutalist concrete, plastered with graffiti. For many years afterwards, I skipped the city on my summer trips to the Greek islands.