Travel Blog

Porthcurno

2010-08-04T12:52:00.001-07:00

One of the world's most perfect beaches...

My hunt is on for Britain's best beach! For years my favourite bit of UK coast was St Ives' Porthmeor beach - but a sunny afternoon spent at Porthcurno has turned my head. Porthcurno has a lovely undiscovered feel about it despite being one of the most photographed places in Britain. The sea is bright green and if you squint in the sun you just might believe you're in the Carribean.
Any - send me your suggestions! Is Britain's best beach Chesil Beach? Or the golden stretches at Camber, the white sand wilderness of a Scottish island beach or the beautiful bleakness of the Norfolk coastline? Send me some ideas - I want to check them out!

Porthgwidden

2010-08-04T12:50:00.000-07:00

Let's talk about food! Anyone who's read other posts on the blog will know one of my fave places in the world is St Ives. I go there at least twice a year - usually to get my head down to write. And when I'm not writing, I like to treat myself to some of the yummy treats in the town's most fabulous cafes, restaurants and delis. Here's my top five St Ives foodie destinations
1. The Cornish deli. Serves up the best ham baguette in the world - no contest. I bring their thick sliced honey roasted ham back home with me.
2. The Moo-maid ice-cream parlour. My little boy's first port of call. The cones are crisp sugar confections with a cow face on them. The delicious ice-cream is from a farm in Zennor and is made from milk from their cows Violet and Daisy.
3. Porthwidden beach cafe. This place is almost Californian beach chic - with its whitewash interiors with splashes of colour. Perfect for Sunday lunch
4. Porthmeor Cafe. Aussie style beach food - go at sunset for spectacular views. I love their Avocado and roma tomatoes on toast for brekkie and their chicken burgers for supper. Finish off with grilled bananas, clotted cream and salted caramel. Dreamy!
5. Porthminster cafe. A St Ives favourite, pitched right on the beach, that continues to deliver. I'm not sure you can find a better view from your dining table anywhere in Britain.

Beer, Beer, we want more beer

2010-08-04T12:48:00.001-07:00

Cute beach huts facing the sea in Beer

I'm always on the look-out for lovely places by the sea. Beer - in Devon is hardly undiscovered (Kirsty Allsop says it's one of her favourite places to holiday). But if you're in that neck of the woods it's well worth the detour. Have a coffee in the beach-side cafe, and feel the pebbles between your toes and the sea-salt on your tongue. English summer-time bliss.

Down at 'the House'

2010-08-04T12:45:00.000-07:00

Pretending to be the Iron Lady

Okay. So it's not really 'travel' but I was very excited to go to the House of Commons for tea, biscuits and chat to support the White Ribbon Alliance, a fantastic charity that raises awareness about the tens of thousand of women who die in childbirth every year. Annie Lennox gave an amazing speech that moved half the room to tears. Please log on to http://www.whiteribbonalliance.org to find out more. It's a cause that every woman should know more about and support.

Cap Ferrat 2

2010-08-04T12:43:00.000-07:00

Pool and sea - perfect!

Kinsale

2010-08-04T12:41:00.001-07:00

Kinsale is so pretty...

Wandering around quirky independent book shops is one of my favourite ways to pass the time - I imagine myself as some character in a romantic adventure who is just about to stumble across some ancient, priceless manuscript. Let me tell you about some of the indie book shops I love.
1. The Kinsale Book-shop. A gem in this pretty coastal Irish town. Straight out of a James Joyce novel
2. Bart's Bookshop - a magical treasure trove of books built around a huge oak tree in the Californian town of Ojai. They call themselves the world's greatest outdoor book-shop. I agree!
3. Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights. Who couldn't love a book-shop with a name like this! This Bath store is just great - particularly the top-floor reading booth where you can bed-in with head-phones, coffee and your favourite tome.
4. Daunt Books. There are a few outposts of this famous book-store but head to their Marylebone branch to feel as if you've stepped back in time to be a character in a Dickens novel.
5. I love Lyme Regis - not just for those French Lieutenant beach moments but for their array of second hand book shops. Try the excellent 'The Bookshop' on Marina Parade by the Cobb or The Sanctuary - on Broad Street which actually offers B&B accomodation to book lovers!

Greece

2010-08-04T12:38:00.000-07:00

This is a view of the pool at the Emelise...

People often ask me - where is a great place for a lazy summer holiday? I always point them in the direction of Fiskardo in Kefelonia. It's a picture post-card greek village - with oodles of chic (some seriously stylish yachts come in to moor) without the glitz or volume of visitors as St Tropez or Marbella. The hotel Emmelise - a five minute shuttle bus from the harbour is a fantastic place to stay in the area. Although it's a stunning boutique bolt-hole, it's not pretentious in the slightest and very family friendly.

My new house...not!

2010-08-04T12:20:00.000-07:00

Mwah!

My friend Alex, the travel editor of Brides magazine has been on the phone. Do I want to go and review a hotel for their Honeymoon guide. Do I? Do I!
We are sent to the Hotel Grand Cap ferrat – a twenty five minute drive from Nice airport on that manicured finger of land known as Cap ferrat. This part of the Cote D'Azur is one of the most expensive places in the world to live – the villas that poke behind the high stone walls belong to Russian oligarches and Euro billionaires. The hotel itself is a gem. You waft around the white foyer feeling like Grace Kelly, eat on the pine scented terrace next to some of the wealthiest people on earth and go for a snooze in a bed the width of a double decker bus. I loved it. My husband loved. The hotel's beach club with its candy pink parasols and azure lap-pool is the last word in Old-school glamour.
The snag - it’s very pricey but I can't think of a better way to start married life or simply to spoil yourself rotten than in this little pocket of paradise.

Summer 2009 - Australia

2009-07-16T17:54:00.000-07:00

As I write, I am sitting at a little desk in our rented house in Noosa, on Australia's Sunshine Coast. From here, I can see the huge waves breaking on the beach. The plan of course is to make a start on the next book, but it's easy to get distracted, with so many beautiful views wherever you walk - and who wants to stay inside when the sky's blue? Still, on the way here we did manage to squeeze in a couple of days in Bangkok (amazing hotel right on the river), then a week in Double Bay in Sydney, then a road-trip through the tropical north, including a hair-raising drive to the Undara lava tubes (proper outback complete with 'roos and emus wandering about, but no real road to speak of), a day snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef and a wonderful visit to the Cape Tribulation in the Daintree Forest - the world's oldest rainforest. I'll update more as we go, but here are a few photos to be going on with. That's Sydney harbour from the top of Rose Bay in the top photo, by the way - beautiful.

The Bush

2009-07-16T15:23:00.000-07:00

Note that there isn't usually that much tarmac!

White sand between the toes

2009-07-16T15:21:00.000-07:00

Me on the beach at Cape Trib. It was seven dollars for the hat!

Winter 2008

2009-06-10T05:03:00.000-07:00

I spent New Years with my closest friends in Cheshire, which was great fun (a Portuguese all-you-can-eat buffet and a man making balloon animals, what more could you ask for?), but we came home to hear that my granddad had passed away. It was terribly sad for all the family, but especially my mum who was particularly close to him, so after the funeral, I took her to Champneys spa which was a great tonic for my mum. She even managed to have a few laughs when we discovered we were there at the same time as Gazza! He seemed to be everywhere we went (especially red-faced in the pool, pic above), so we began to suspect he was stalking us. It was lovely to get away for a few days, even if I did have to take my laptop, with the deadline for Original Sin looming. I think this book was a little harder to finish, possibly because most of it is set in New York. It’s a city I know very well, but when you live in England, it’s not like you can just nip out and check you’ve got the correct description of a brownstone townhouse in the Village… Plus, I thought ‘OS’ was going to be my shortest book but somehow the characters seem to take on a life of their own and it ended up being my longest!

Caught the first few days of Spring (well, a bit of sunshine) at Kew Gardens, where the bluebells were popping up everywhere – who says global warming can’t be romantic?

What else…? Well it was great fun catching up with authors Sasha Blake and Jo Rees for a shoot for Marie Claire magazine (see the press section). Although people probably expect authors writing in the same genre to be deadly rivals (hey, not a bad idea for a novel…), lots of us are good friends. The life of a novelist can be quite a solitary one unless you use it as a good excuse for a long lunch and cocktails, of course. Although since I had a baby, my liver – the traitor – has decided to give up alcohol, so a few sips of Sauvignon Blanc require a lie-down. Hey, come to think of it, maybe my fellow authors are trying to poison me…

Summer 2008

2009-06-08T08:55:00.000-07:00

Have you ever seen that Kate Winslet/Cameron Diaz film The Holiday? If you have you’ll know all about home exchange websites, which the two characters use to swop their houses in England and LA. Well, I did it too. Inspired by Hollywood (sadly, that’s the story of my life!), I decided to let a complete stranger - two complete strangers, in fact - live in my house while I travelled to the other side of the world to live in theirs. It was a slightly surreal experience, browsing through the houses on offer on the site – from Brazil to Tuscany – and thinking ‘Ooh, could I live in a cabin in the middle of Yellowstone Park?’ Finally we settled on two – one in Hawaii and one in California, both near the beach as I reasoned I needed lovely views as I would be writing all the time we were there. It was very exciting, but we were very, very nervous setting off. After all, who knew if their houses were going to even be there? Would they strip ours of the valuables and the floorboards? Would they wear my shoes? But we needn’t have worried. Both houses were just amazing and the people were lovely to us.
Our first stint was in the eastern part of Maui which was beyond gorgeous. They don’t call it paradise for nothing, it was exactly as you’d imagine the Hawaiian Islands to be – lush, peaceful and exotic, bananas and mangoes literally falling from the trees. The house had a wraparound veranda which looked out onto unbroken coastline and the blue sea beyond. The pic above is of the giant Banyan tree in the garden, with a little table below for plein air breakfasts. Honestly, it was like being on the set of Lost, only without the polar bears. Actually, Lost is filmed on one of the other islands, and it was probably just as well we weren’t anywhere near the set – Matthew Fox and Josh Holloway in the area might be a little distracting for someone with 150,000 words to write!

Anyway, look out for Maui’s appearance in Original Sin, there’s a scene featuring an amazing little ‘secret beach’ you have to risk life and limb to get to. If you ever go there, make sure you go to the ‘Seven Pools of Serenity’, an amazing place of beauty and calm. It was in ‘OS’, but got chopped in the final edit.
Tearing ourselves away from Hawaii, we moved on to California.

Our friend Michael was working on the Sherlock Holmes movie with Guy Ritchie down the road in LA and living at Madonna’s Beverley Hills compound. It was very exciting getting weekly missives from the world of Hollywood, although he kept insisting that the rumours of a divorce were rubbish (!). I also experienced my first earthquake out there! There I was sitting at my desk, hoping chapter 28 would miraculously present itself when I would much rather have been at the beach – and the earth moved. Actually, the earth sort of rolled. For about ten seconds it was very scary. We also felt the tremors when the volcano went off in Hawaii – maybe it was something we did? On our way back, we drove up Highway One, along the spectacular cliffs of Big Sur, stopping off at Hearst Castle (I often write about billionaires, but William Randolph Hearst makes them all look like paupers!) and staying in Carmel (a perfect little coastal village where Clint Eastwood lives), before finishing up in San Francisco. After Southern California, it was freezing, but I loved walking past those pastel townhouses you’ve seen in Bullitt and Vertigo. Then we flew cross-country to NYC for my birthday, where my husband took me for breakfast at Tiffany’s, lunch at the Boathouse in Central Park (also featuring in Original Sin) and dinner at Gordon Ramsey. He’s got a lot to follow this year!

Sunset from the verandah in Hawaii

2008-06-11T07:32:00.000-07:00

Pool at Hearst Castle

2008-06-10T07:34:00.000-07:00

That's me standing in front of this pool (and grinning) in the author photo at the top of the blog. One day, I will live here.

Me by the pool at Hearst Castle

2008-04-10T07:36:00.000-07:00