High summer. Day three of a journey through rural France. It’s peak holiday season. Here are three things you might not expect to find in the country at this time. First, wild flowers in profusion, banks of them surrounding me wherever I go: deep blue delphiniums, delicate pale-blue harebells, pink-tinged scabious, genipi, buttercups, daisies and thick, velvety green grass. Not the sort of blooms you will encounter in late summer on the scorched-earth shores of the Mediterranean.
 |
 |
Consumer groups have criticised Ryanair for temporarily closing its website over one of the busiest weekends of the year – yet refusing to waive penalties for passengers who fail to check in online.
 |
 |
First holiday memory?
 |
 |
After a plink and a fizz, a decapitated Sir Richard Branson quietly drowned in a sea of gin and raspberry liquor. But the billionaire airline boss didn’t seem to mind. His face was fixed in a grin just as content as that of any of the drinkers perched along his on-board bar, 35,000ft above the Atlantic, where a chap in a red bow-tie had only just finished shaking him about, dousing him in club soda and serving him up with a little pink flower on top.
 |
 |
The human animal can still get a thrill from using wood to suit our purposes. Taking the time to carve your own whistle from an elder branch traces the handiwork of our ancestors and resounds in us long after the note has vanished into the air.
 |
 |
If you ever find yourself motoring from York to the east-coast resorts of Scarborough, Filey or Whitby, or further north to the North York Moors, make sure you take in the pleasant little market town of Malton, which was founded 2,000 years ago by the Romans. As you drive past the war memorial, you might, if the clouds part, see the golden letters spelling Talbot Hotel reflect the sun.
 |
 |
Each week, we invite three companies to offer us their best deal for a specific holiday.
 |
 |
Since childhood, Italy has been special to me. It was the first foreign country I visited as a teenager and so it was officially the most exotic place in the world. Although that wasn’t hard – frankly, anywhere outside Strathclyde could have laid claim to that title in 1982. I also share my surname with the Italian city of Ancona. (My Italian heritage is all rather tenuous, madly fluctuating, according to whom I’m talking. Needless to say, if I was with Al Pacino, I’d be first generation.) It sounds exotic, but actually Ancona is a port on the east coast of Italy in Le Marche and a city with a bad football team; it’s a bit like being named Ronni Grimsby. Obviously, I was very excited about flying into Ancona airport, but then quickly very disappointed at the lack of reaction to my surname at Ancona passport control.
 |
 |
Is any foodstuff as booby-trapped as a xiaolongbao? Here are just a few of the things that can go wrong when you attempt to eat one of these iconic Shanghai pork soup dumplings: first, assuming your xiaolongbao is of the highest quality, its skin will be so thin as to be virtually translucent, and your chopsticks will almost certainly pierce a hole, releasing the piping hot soup into its grass-lined steamer basket, tragically never to be savoured – the catastrophe compounded as the newly pierced hole takes on board an excess of the vinegar-ginger dip. Or perhaps this sublime parcel of porcine perfection will burst en route to your mouth, shooting its contents over your shirt, chin or innocent bystanders. Meanwhile, misjudge their temperature and you risk a quantity of scalding pork soup detonating in your mouth. It’s porky Russian roulette, I tell you.
 |
 |
