Walkopedia - the world's best walks

An excellent and well-named site, Walkopedia, an online encyclopedia of the world's best walks. Here is a very wholesome and confidence-inspiring photograph of the founder, William Mackesy, who has tried out upwards of 70 of the 100 world's best (according to Walkopedia) walks. You can tell the weatherbeaten hero really has walked to summit of this mountain or whatever it is, not just been plastered with orange make-up and airlifted in by a 50-strong television crew. The core treks are intrepid GAP year or mid-life crisis stuff: Ayer's Rock; the Drakensberg Escarpment; Leaping Tiger Gorge in China; the Shikoku Pilgrimage; the Diamond Mountains in North Korea. But site followers are encourged to feed in their personal odysseys, so there is a growing number of less ambitious but no less uplifting walks to be discovered. They haven't got as far as mapping some of my personal favourites yet, St James's Square to Queen Anne's Gate, or the first nine holes of the Alberoni golf club on the Venice Lido. But that will come. Meanwhile, an important point. However long or short, easy or arduous a walk might be, it should surely be undertaken for pleasure and not, as it were, at gunpoint. Is this scenario familiar? It certainly is to me. You come to the end of an agreeable Sunday lunch at a friend's place in the country. You postpone the trip back to town until Monday morning. Your fifth glass of claret sparkles like a rare Burmese temple ruby in the late afternoon sunlight, stealing flecks of viridian, blue and gold from Turkey carpets and Brabazon water-colours. Humphrey, the family's amiable golden retriever, rests his lustrous, doting head on your knee. "Whassup, Humphrey? There's a good chap... There's a good chap... You're my besht friend, aren't you?" A gentlemanly longcase clock, the dial alive with sporting Keatsian nymphs, measures away these long, precious, pleasure-loaded minutes. Then suddenly your host brightly announces that everyone is to go for a 'walk' - and he's drawn the map of hell well in advance. "We'll go as far as Madman's Folly then cut off down into Plague Field... Follow the Flooze back as far as Temple Priesthole... We'll have an hour or so to spare before the pub opens so we'll scamper up Wild Sally's Fell and take a look at the Devil's Ring"... and so on. Four hours later you're back, out of the chill, drizzling twilight, drenched, aching, miserable. I say all this not because I dislike walking - I don't - but because walking is one of life's greatest pleasures. It's like opera. Break in the virgin with tender loving care rather than attempt to relive the retreat from Moscow. Send your favourite walks to walkopedia.

The Rabbit Hell of Keifer Gray

I wonder if pet shops sell thousands of rabbits in the run-up to Easter. I suppose they do. I've just come across an enthralling article by Thomas 'Keifer' Gray, an engineer from Houston, Texas. In it he demythologizes the long-eared layabouts once and for all: "Although some people and organizations, such as the House Rabbit Society, might like you to believe that rabbits make great companions, I have determined that, while bunnies might look cute and cuddly, in reality they are ill-tempered, destructive, boring, unrewarding animals which, in my opinion, make poor pets." The article, well worth reading (see below) if you're thinking of keeping a rabbit, triggered a fair amount of hate mail, some of it, according to Gray, "undecipherable". But whatever Gray's detractors might say, there is no denying the suffering the Gray family endured at the hands of these creatures - and for so little reward. Caveat emptor, some would say; but it takes a brave man to challenge a mindset so widely held as to be nearly sacred, and this is what Gray has done in the case of unquestioning knee-jerk bunny-love. As for me, we never had rabbits when I was a child - cats, dogs, a chameleon, parrots, but never a rabbit. I quite enjoyed Enid Blyton's version of Brer Rabbit, but I loathed Peter Rabbit. And I successfully resisted Watership Down. Read Thomas Gray's article here. And here's a selection of 25 rabbit recipes for every occasion, supplied by Sheila Crompton of the Bolton Ferret Welfare Society. It's a brutal world, isn't it.

Stan...

Preparing to give a talk on English comedy (they're not laughing now...) End up watching a South Bank Special in honour of Stan Laurel. I'd forgotten how funny he was - when I was six I'd howl and roll about. Later in life you respond to rather more than the slapstick - one of the funniest scenes is in Beau Hunks when they've joined the French Foreign Legion. Stan asks the commandant if he and Ollie may be excused and "go home". They've had enough. But this clip is the very best. It overturns all that nonsense about not acting with animals - if you're good enough, then you can.

Gaddafi wrecked our holiday arrangements

Holidaymakers up in arms as dictator wrecks
no-refund Med getaways.

Papers full of the Libya crisis - and pictures of Gaddafi. He's aged badly, in more ways than one. I wonder how many of us in Britain actually know where Libya is? At the beginning of the Falklands War, a great many Britons believed the Falkland Islands to be somewhere off the coast of Scotland and were understandably outraged at the prospect of an Argentine invasion. With the Gulf, and more recently with Afghanistan, popular perceptions of the geography remain pretty sketchy - try at random in the pub asking someone to draw a map of where he supposes the theatre of war to be. In the end, people probably felt that Kuwait and Helmand, wherever they might be, were sufficiently far away from Berkshire or Alderley Edge for it not to make too much difference to everyday life if we went to war there or not. So why not go. But Libya is a rather different proposition, right on our doorstep and within striking distance of all our favourite holiday spots in the Mediterranean. Part of me is thinking, "I'm shoulder to shoulder with the anti-war protesters who'll be congregating over the coming week in Parliament Square. God bless them. And God bless our boys too, who selflessly fight and fall in fields of conflict the world over, regardless of the right and wrong of it all and often not fully understanding what it is they're fighting against". And part of me is thinking "What about the summer holidays? Will I be able to borrow Zach and Miranda's place in the Med this year? What about flights? Will the no-fly zone apply to Easyjet? Thank I God I don't own a holiday home within 2,000 miles of Tripoli. I told him he should never have bought it..." So much for me. I wonder how mixed everyone else's feelings will be as the terrible beast of war slouches closer and closer to home?

Distinctly not 'Fluttering and dancing in the breeze'...

We have a selection of ties...

Invited for mid-morning coffee at the Ritz but barred entry by a gratuitously noisy mid-European Rosa Klebb type on the grounds that I was wearing a cravat, not the obligatory tie. "We have a selection of ties you can choose from..." she said huskily, her muscles rippling beneath the livery. So we decamped to the ever congenial Franco's in Jermyn Street (more of which shortly). I take the point - dress codes should be observed - but what became of the old school deference, discretion and kindliness an incorrectly dressed person would certainly have encountered at the Ritz a quarter of a century ago? And - another sign of the times - it seems faintly absurd to insist that non-residents pole up dressed like tailor's dummies in a golf club when guests who are actually staying at the Ritz (particularly Yanks, it has to be said) think nothing of shambling through the lobby in North Face anoraks and Uggs. Other areas require attention too, in particular the extremely scruffy window boxes outside the Rivoli Bar in the Ritz's Piccadilly-facing arcade. It doesn't take a Wordsworth to work out that daffodils look awful in planters. Their charm is very much of the 'here today, gone tomorrow' stamp: ablaze in a distant landscape they're one thing: in a window box they do little more than evoke a suburban roundabout. So get with it, Ritz. Fire Rosa Klebb. And get a decent, thoughtful, poetry-reading gardener to tend the boxes. Over at Franco's, the usual immaculate service - and an agreeably bizarre note in both ladies and gents lavatories - loudspeakers overhead emitting the quiet, homely but unmistakeably insistent tones of Alan Bennett reading stories from Winnie the Pooh.

Ozzmosis

Pleasant review of Literary Companion London by Chris Moss in Time Out. I'm described as "open-minded" and "savvy". This morning I was in the local newsagent, thumbing through the mag to check if the review had appeared. "You gonna buy that or what?" said the newsagent (we have ongoing daily banter). "I may well buy it, if I'm in it..." I replied. And yes, there was the review, with not only a picture of the book cover but also, unusually, an author photo. The newsagent was nonplussed. "That just don't look like you. That's more like that Ozzy Osbourne. People gonna get ideas." Well, why not. J'y suis, j'y reste. The Ozzy Osbourne of the literary anthology...

Tom Brown's Schooldays

Just picked up a DVD of the excellent remake of Tom Brown's Schooldays with Stephen Fry as Arnold and Jemma Redgrave as his wife, Mary. There's a touching domestic scene in which Fry and Redgrave are sitting in bed sipping tea, illustrative of the formidable pedagogue's tender side. I'll wager my son Alexander is the only boy in Christendom to have seen his godmother in bed with Stephen Fry.