I’ve just spent a foodie afternoon in the middle of Regent’s Park which, in a quick floral aside, I’d like to note is looking stunning. Colour-coded flower-beds no less and zingy green lawns. Thank you rain. But back to affairs of the palate, Taste of London (an annual food fest) has certainly gone into overdrive with a line-up of over 40 top restaurants beside an army of food and drink producers. All these have escaped from their usual settings to man swish little stands under huge tents. One stand even housed repro Chesterfield sofas, maybe a sop for the exorbitant £25 entrance fee.

As usual, London seems to go into over-drive before putting on the brakes for the long, inevitably cool English summer. I’ve had an inspiring past week, from seeing Akram Khan’s Bahok, with dancers from the National Ballet of China, to the brutally moving documentary on torture in Afghanistan, Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Darkside. In between there was the opening of the brilliant Cy Twombly retrospective at the Tate Modern (that reminds me of a successful Italian gallerist I met the other day who seemed to think retrospectives are only for dead artists - “shame on you” to borrow la Clinton’s words) and the extraordinary play, The Pitmen Painters, at the National. And here’s the sleek Tate Modern exit just to whet your appetite…

Like a rocket, Viva la Revolucion! is now out there, not exactly in outer space or the ether, though it is on a few websites, but certainly in the public eye. Last night, on a balmy summer’s evening, the launch party kicked off at the Mexican Ambassador’s residence, a consummately chic mansion on Belgrave Square. It was an exhilirating send-off, nourished by trays and trays of delicious Mexican morsels and flowing margaritas. (Now I’m going to cheat a bit for this post & insert pics from Mexico itself - as you can imagine, I had no time to snap last night. This one is of a divine chilli and prawn ceviche)

So where in the world are we? This snap taken a couple of days ago should qualify as one of those quiz pics. Answers on a postcard please. There’s something of the Wild West about it - the light, the pines, the distant bare ridges. And the answer is… Morecambe Bay, more precisely Arnside, in Lancashire. Trains regularly cross the estuary at low tide, eventually head west to Barrow then turn right to trundle north to Carlisle. OK, that’s enough for the train-spotting chapter.

Arnside itself is a low-key seaside village boasting one pub with views and one great landmark - the Knott. Not a knot of nets, but a rather large knoll scattered with wild scrub and wind-swept trees. At the summit, fabulous views sweep across the vast bay down to Morecambe, site of the tragedy a few years ago when 21 Chinese cockle-pickers died, caught unawares by the treacherous tides. So the view has a bitter-sweet taste to it.

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.

It happens again and again - a country that just can’t seem to crawl out from under. I wrote a post about Burma only last autumn during the horrendous crackdown on demonstrating monks. All they wanted was freedom of expression, and above all freedom from the military junta. For a few weeks world headlines channelled our attention on them and calculated (hopelessly) the murders at the hands of the regime - then there was silence.

Funny how you can spend years whizzing round the world without really knowing your own country. Big mistake I’m at last realising. So for once, tucking away my carbon bootprint, I headed north from London by road and, again for once, the partner was in tow. Or rather he was towing me. We drive very differently. I tend to go hell for leather and catch up on lost time burning up motorways, while he, of a distinctly more patient frame of mind, deals with city traffic ten times more efficiently. My other big wheels forte is twisting through hills and, in the case of this little sortie, dales. These Yorkshire specialities nestle between spectacular moors, so I was in my element.

I’ve always enjoyed a quick fix of Turkish kebap - preferably a tender shish singed to perfection over open coals in clouds of pungent smoke. They do it pretty well round the corner from me in north London, but even better in Anatolia itself (that name is so much more exotic than Turkey, or Turkiye, which somehow gobbles). Anyway, what I was unaware of until last week was the vast range of kebabs at their source. Nor did I realise that history in south-east Anatolia floats around between 9000 BC (we actually saw a cult centre from this time) and the Ottomans - racing through Hittites, neo-Hittites, Assyrians, Romans and many others. As mind-boggling as the food, but far more conjectural.

Years ago I was flying back from somewhere in South-East Asia, or maybe it was Australia, when I spotted way down below, smack in the middle of the Indian Ocean, a cluster of myriad islands. You probably know the kind - encircled by white then various shades of turquoise, seemingly afloat in endless ultramarine. One of my greatest pleasures is flying over countries I know and pinpointing places I’ve been to. The next is spotting places I want to go to. Those islands stuck in my mind for years, somehow always inaccessible yet ever enticing. Now I’m just back from them - they are the Andaman Islands. In other words - Paradise Found.

I’ve just spent a few days in Zaragoza to inspect the building site for Expo 2008, but with secondary intent too, namely to check on local tapas standard. That subplot seems to be an instinctive reaction the moment I set foot on Iberian soil, a harkback to seven years ago when I was researching my book New Tapas. That job entailed weeks of travelling round Spain checking out tapas-bars. Tough. Ever since, I’ve had a deep professional regard for them and their products. Zaragoza, though I’d been there once briefly, meant virgin tapas terrain for me.