All the fuss over Richard Branson — and he  failed in his attempt this week at  a record-breaking crossing of the Channel by kite-board.

I was much more impressed by Baron Arnaud de Rosnay. Never heard of him? Neither had I, until I started combing the Telegraph archives for an anthology of great journeys by water.  In 1979 De Rosnay — who comes from a family that owns sugar estates in Mauritius — sailboarded across the Bering Strait from Alaska to the then Soviet military zone in Siberia. And he hadn’t told the Russians he was coming . . .

You can read the full story when the anthology — provisionally entitled Bon Voyage! — is published by Aurum in the autumn, but here is a taster from Mark Law’s account for the Telegraph Magazine:

Eventually, at 10.15 one blustery morning, watched by a small group of friends and helpers, he set off. A compass was fixed on the arm of his wetsuit and in a bag on his harness was his emergency equipment – it included small signalling flares, vitamin pills and a knife. In a waterproof bag fixed to the board was a change of clothing, a camera, his passport, a cutting from Pravda about his Sahara crossing, the letter from the Russian Embassy, some chocolate and $500 (about £250) in cash. The message he had recorded for Radio Nome was broadcast half an hour after his departure. “We knew the Russians liked to listen to the station,” he says.

For four months de Rosnay had been studying the waters of the strait. He had learnt that the mountains on either side channelled the wind in such a way that it tended to be stronger at the two sides than in the middle. When he started it was quite light and all went well until he was about halfway across: then the wind dropped almost completely. He spent an awkward two hours trying to maintain his position in the choppy water against the current. In the afternoon the wind changed direction and increased sharply.

De Rosnay had begun to tire and, besides, he was getting extremely cold. During the 10 days of training before he set off he had tried to use his gloves as little as possible because their waterproof rigidity made holding the wishbone (the boom of the craft) more of a strain. However, now that his hands were cold, he reached for his gloves – only to discover he had lost them.

It’s a rare journalist or writer these days who doesn’t use a computer. It’s a rarer one still who doesn’t find himself or herself saying, “Why can’t the people who make programs that we have to use take some account of the way we work?” Well, some of them do. For my last two books, I’ve used a Mac-only program called Scrivener, which was devised by a man named Keith after he had read a piece by Hilary Mantel about the way she works. It’s not flawless — I’ve just had a bit of trouble converting the finished book into a form that a PC at my publishers can read — but it’s by far the best writing program I’ve ever used and I would recommend it to anyone who is working on a book or on on any written project with more than one brief section. I’m nowhere near making the most of its capabilities, but I’m learning more with every book and article I work on. I could wax lyrical here about what you can do with Scrivener and how easy it is to use, but the point of the web, surely, is to save duplication with links, so I will just point you to the Scrivener site so that you can find out for yourself and download it free to have a go. No, I’m not on commission, and I paid for my own copy after playing for a while with the free download. I just think that anything that makes the job easier is worth passing on.

To the English-Speaking Union last night, after a day in which Peter Mandelson’s score-settling memoirs had been causing ructions in the Labour Party. The occasion was an evening dedicated to Mark Twain, to mark the release of his unexpurgated autobiography and its serialisation in Granta. The Canadian actor Kerry Shale, doing the readings, was thoroughly convincing in voicing both Huck Finn and Twain himself, while Twain’s role in American literature was discussed by John Freeman, editor of Granta, the playwright and critic Bonnie Greer, and Robert McCrum, associate editor of the Observer. Parts of the autobiography have appeared before, but Twain himself insisted that much of his most acerbic opinions on American life and politics be cut lest they damage his reputation. He effectively embargoed the work for a century. “Perhaps,” McCrum suggested, “Peter Mandelson should have done the same.”

A week ago, asked by an editor to provide some background details about myself, I said that I had grown up in Northern Ireland and still loved it, because its geography had always been prettier than its politics. I had been thinking lately that even the politics weren’t as ugly as they used to be — and then the marching season arrived. This morning on the Today programme on Radio 4, a weary John Humphrys, trying to explain the latest night of rioting, was reduced to saying to one of the BBC’s reporters, “Is it because Protestants and Catholics still don’t like each other…?”

I’m reminded of what the comedian James Young, having satirised the bigots on both sides, used to say at the end of his show:

“Will ye for God’s sake stop fightin!”

At a workshop organised earlier this week by the Latin American Travel Association, my journalist colleagues and I were asked by a tour operator whether we thought he needed to hire a PR firm or could make a stab at doing the job himself.

We all advised him to have a go. After all, he was the expert on his company and where it operated. As journalists, we told him, we much preferred dealing directly with people in the travel trade rather than through intermediaries.

There are some excellent PRs representing travel companies. Many of the best have worked previously in the travel trade or journalism, or both, and are running their own companies. There are bigger firms, too, that do a good job, particularly in representing companies that don’t have an office in Britain.

There are also a lot of poor ones. I’m thinking of those firms that insist their young staff phone us to say: “Have you got our press release?” I don’t know how many of these “press releases” I get every day –- I wouldn’t dare try to count them, but here’s an indication: one of my colleagues returned from maternity leave this year to find that in nine months she had been sent 22,000 emails, and most of those were from PR firms. I’ve been on the desk three times as long as she has, so it’s probably fair to assume that I get a few more.

There wouldn’t be time to read half of them, even if I agreed that they were as “interesting”, “thrilling” and “exciting” as the writers claim. There certainly isn’t time to respond to messages on an answerphone asking if I have received them.

Yesterday morning, I had an email from a PR firm asking whether I had received an earlier email about some hotels. One of the hotels was “new”, but there was nothing else in the email to still my finger over the delete button. The writer said she was looking forward to hearing my ideas.  Hang on: surely ideas are what she is being paid to come up with . . .

A tiny bit of irony in a new poster from the German tourist board I’ve just seen outside Marks & Spencer in Victoria station. Above a picture of Michael Ballack in the national football strip are the words “Germany. A great place to visit when you’ve got time to spare.”  In smaller letters, just above, it says: “You can’t beat Germany for value.”

The New York Times had a story yesterday about a man who can’t tear himself away from his computer screens. In the plural. Admittedly he’s an extreme case and works in software development, but his inability to switch off and his tendency to be easily distracted are shortcomings shared these days by many of us. There’s a link to a video tracking the movements of his eyes as he sits at his work-station. Watching it for a few minutes is almost enough to make you physically sick.

In reading about him, you find yourself following his own bad example. Get to the bottom of the first page of the story and you see that there are another four pages to go. Now, can you make yourself read to the end without being distracted by the bells and whistles elsewhere on the NYT site, never mind by the emails pinging into your inbox on that other screen or one of the other half-dozen browser pages you have open?

I did –- and then I ordered a copy of The Shallows, a new book by Nicholas Carr, who writes wonderfully well about technology. Its premise: that the web could be leading to a rewiring of our brains, making us less able to think in any depth.

As the blurb puts it, “We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection.”

This blog is coming to you from London, a city where, when people are escaping from their desks and then forced to return to their desks, they talk of nothing but holidays. Do they ever use the word vacation? No. So why do the witless staff of PR firms based in this same city insist on using inelegant variations of that word? In email after email my colleagues and I are bombarded with references to staycations, mancations and neighcations. This week, from the firm entrusted with burnishing the image of KLM, we received a “guide to the world’s best floatcations”. You know what the person who wrote that needs? A holiday.

My piece for the Telegraph about the Maharajas’ Express is now online. The photograph below is of the camel ride into the desert that I mention in the text.

I’ve taken this week off to get away from the office and the news and immerse myself in the archives, digging out the Telegraph’s best writing on journeys by water. But there’s no escaping that Icelandic volcano. Look at this, in a review by David Holloway of Tim Severin’s book The Brendan Voyage, published in 1978:

In brief, Mr Severin set out to do a “Kon Tiki” on behalf of St. Brendan. Medieval accounts said that the Irish Saint had gone to the “Promised Land.” An amount of circumstantial detail is supplied that could have been either the usual flummery of moral fables (dragons, giants and the like) or exact descriptions of natural phenomena observed while island-hopping across the north Atlantic. The giant smiths who threw hot rocks at Brendan, for instance, might have been an Icelandic volcano in eruption.