The best is inland, by far. The Cote d’Azur had its heyday a few decades ago, and now it feels distinctly stuck-in-a-bling-rut. Over-bronzed Bardot lookalikes with taught lifted faces are still, somehow, the norm. Even the boutiques of Cannes’ rue d’Antibes seem to cater for a particular kind of fussy glitz that (luckily) doesn’t exist anywhere else. Yet nothing can change the spectacular topography, however many neo-Provençal villas dot the hillside and apartment blocks rim the towns, and if you’re lucky enough to find that perfect restaurant with a view, it’s close to heaven.

France is part of me and the last week or so sometimes felt like a travelling déja vu. My ‘holidays’ were in fact a manic race from the south of France to the north. En route we scooped up Provençal sun and rain as well as endlessly twisting roads to a lost monastery, now a convent (where I opened a little wooden shutter to pick up a phone & ring the Abbess but chickened out - that would mean the end of my globetrotting life).

We knew we were paying through the nose, but boy did we need it. A long series of mishaps and delays (no I won’t go into them except that at one point I thought I’d been shot back into the film Bagdad Café as, bag in hand, I trudged along an endless, empty road) had meant that it was mid-afternoon when we finally emerged from the Channel tunnel. We were famished and frustrated, but our priority was a DIY store to pick up some items my friends had spotted on a website. Our steely determination temporarily won the day but an hour or so of wandering through the Gallic equivalent of B & Q was enough; our stomachs were crying for revolution.

As I queued at Stansted airport to check-in last Friday, I realised life is not always a picnic. It was mayhem and the Tower of Babel ruled. Thinking back a few weeks, the Eos flight from Stansted to New York had been unreal. Easyjet was more like it - back to reality with a bump, although I have to say the flight itself was faultless. In fact I’ve always tried to mix the high-life with the low-life (well not too low) and really enjoy simple hotels, beach-huts, boats and hammocks. Sleeping in vans, cars and buses comes a lot lower on my list but has cropped up quite often over the years - generally a result of minor natural disasters: landslides, floods, low budget, that kind of thing.