If the phrase “wild Essex” calls nothing more to mind than a hen party in stilettos draining bottles of Bacardi Breezer, maybe you need to read the piece Robert Macfarlane wrote for yesterday’s Review section in The Guardian. It’s what he calls an alternative account of the Essex landscape. Having travelled around Britain and Ireland for his book The Wild Places, he was invited by the BBC to make a film in which he confined his explorations to that single English county. The result is due to be screened on Wednesday. It should be worth watching.

I went to the Cervantes Institute on Friday for the first of a series of conversations between Paul Preston, historian of the Spanish Civil War, and British writers who have lived in Spain.
He started with Michael Jacobs (a contributor to the Telegraph’s Saturday magazine and our travel pages), who laid into the stereotyping that fills so much travel writing about Spain. He said he would “rather die of poverty” than reinforce some of those stereotypes, among them the notion that “the real Spain is Andalusia” or that the country as a whole is fundamentally Moorish. He had no time for mysticism, and found duende “a particularly irritating concept”.
I thought he was a little unfair to newspaper travel sections, which may perpetuate some of the clichés but have also given space in recent years to those who challenge them — including himself.
But he’s right that many who go in search of the “real Spain”, a place they perceive as rural and unchanged, have failed to record and reflect the effect that immigration is having on the country. Jacobs said he had grown used to the sight of shepherds in out-of-the-way parts chattering into mobile phones. But on a walk recently in the footsteps of El Cid, he was startled to meet a shepherd who didn’t understand Spanish — he turned out to be Romanian. In Jacobs’s own corner of Andalusia, Frailes, he was living in a community that included not only Romanians but Moroccans, Ecuadoreans and Bolivians.
The conversation touched on the legacy of the Civil War, on the question of whether Spain is one country or many, and on the largely one-way movement of travel writers between Britain and Spain.
When asked why he did not write more about the Basque Country, Jacobs said that it was a lovely part of the world but that when he had last written about it he had received emails telling him that he wouldn’t be welcome to return. “On top of my Jewish-Catholic paranoia, the prospect of being threatened by a Basque is not particularly appealing.”
Someone in the audience asked why no British writers were interested in the Canary Islands, prompting Jacobs to point out that Galicia, too, had been neglected as a subject. And why, someone asked, were Spanish writers not examining the weird ways of the British as energetically as everyone from Richard Ford to Chris Stewart had reported on the Spanish.
Jacobs said: “The Spanish have taken a great interest in what the British say about them, but the British have taken no interest whatsoever in what the Spanish say about them.”
Preston noted that there was a similar imbalance in academic study. “There are Spanish academics who think they know about Britain,” he joked, “but this takes the form of wearing dicky bows.”
Judging from this one, the next couple of sessions should be worth hearing. On February 26 Professor Preston will be talking to Jason Webster (writer, among other things, of a bestseller entitled Duende) and on March 18 to Chris Stewart, author of Driving Over Lemons. For details see the Cervantes Institute website under “Cultural Events”.

When I was a kid, my father, a plasterer who in his spare time played fiddle, banjo and accordion, would regularly invite his fellow musicians back to our house — often after the pubs had shut. Having had a drink and a bite to eat, they would sing for their supper.
Daryl Hall has a similar habit. He invites home his heroes and his contemporaries and younger players whose music he’s taken a shine to. The big difference is that Daryl Hall is the Hall of Hall & Oates, the duo behind such hits as Rich Girl and Private Eyes, and so his supper guests include Smokey Robinson, Nick Lowe and K T Tunstall. Those three are among the names that pop up in the archives of Live From Daryl’s House, a monthly podcast that Hall generously puts up online so everyone else can enjoy the fun. The latest, which went up yesterday, features the man I missed at the 100 Club on Wednesday: Eli “Paperboy” Reed. Eli at Daryl’s is not quite as electrifying as he was when I saw him on stage in London last year, but it’s still worth hearing.

And here he is live in a gig earlier this month in Mallorca:

Stuck at home with a cold (and prevented from seeing Eli Paperboy Reed at the 100 Club last night), I’ve been escaping outdoors through the pages of Roger Deakin’s Wildwood, his account of the mutually dependent relationship between man and trees. It’s partly natural history, partly travelogue and wholly delightful — a reminder of what we lost when he died in 2006 at only 63.
Here’s a a sample:

The wonderful thing about driftwood is the way the action of the sea etches the softer wood between the lines of grain, revealing the sinews, bleaching it to a pale grey, smoothing it, rounding all edges and corners. You want to pick it up and handle it. Responding to just this impulse, I lifted one side of a handsome slab of pine twice the size of a loaf, with beautifully sea-rounded corners. . . Beneath it in a hollow was a long-tailed field mouse and her nest. She stood her ground beside it as two or three of her young, half grown already, did just the right thing, escaping efficiently into the cover of the next-door clump of samphire. Embarrassed to have disturbed the family. . . I gently returned their roof into position, wishing there were some way of reassuring them that this was a genuine mistake and they were quite safe. The look of hurt, uncertainty and puzzlement in the mouse’s face has stayed with me. So has her courage in standing by the nest, decoying us from her young. It is salutary to be reminded of the extent of your own power and your potential for accidental brutality.

And here’s another:

I drive down Castle Cary, where the evening before had been calm, and I had witnessed a posse of badgers sauntering nonchalantly along the street beneath Lodge Hill, knocking the tops off dustbins like teenagers and rifling them, even pausing to tip over the ice-cream sign outside the newsagent’s. Emerging early from the snouting dingles of the town at dusk, they went their rounds with impatient efficiency, jogging from house to like council workers on some lucrative bonus scheme.

Everyone is predicting that 2010 will be the year of the Kindle, or of whatever easier-to-use device Apple comes up with. John Naughton, in The Observer, reckons that e-readers will be particularly popular among travellers. Why? “Because they offer the only way of taking a reasonable amount of holiday reading on a Ryanair flight.”

The Today programme on Radio 4 this morning, with the footballer Tony Adams as guest editor, had an item on football songs. They were all even more tuneless and witless than they seemed when first released. The only football song worth listening to, of course, was written by a woman: England 2, Colombia 0, by the late, great Kirsty MacColl:

One of the pieces I used in Last Call for the Dining Car was by Martyn Harris, whom I was lucky enough to commission when I was editor of the OpEd page of The Daily Telegraph. After Martyn’s death from cancer in 1996, the paper published a compilation of his work, for which Max Hastings wrote an introduction. Max said Martyn had told him several times that he, Martyn, could never do what Max had done and work as a war correspondent. Max’s response was this: “. . . it is far easier for a journalist to write about a great drama unfolding before him — a battle, an earthquake, a riot — than it is to conjure a brilliant literary souffle out of the commonplace ingredients of everyday life. . . ”

I was reminded of that remark when judging Telegraph Travel’s Just Back of the Year competition. Our top five included pieces on Mount Fuji, a ‘death’ on the Nile, the view from a window in Warsaw, and what one woman learned of Australia from a hospital bed in Melbourne. The one we chose as a winner, by Richard Lakin, was on an average day out with the family at a British beach.

You can still rely on The New York Times not to get carried away. Here’s a headline from today’s paper:

Web Site for Woods Is Drawing Attention
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
Tiger Woods’s personal Web site has had an increase in visitors since he issued a statement about his car accident on Nov. 29.

Lovely story in the New York Times today about a man who has earned half a million dollars over the past 10 years in the betting shops of Manhattan. But he’s not a bookie or a punter. He’s a stooper: he picks up the betting slips that others have thrown away.

It was instructive to be in India in the run-up to the  anniversary of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. I was attending the conference of the Association of Independent Tour Operators, in Cochin, Kerala.

On my way to the airport for the return flight, I was given a gift-wrapped package by the tour rep who had organised my outing the previous day on a houseboat in the backwaters. “It’s a miniature houseboat, a souvenir of your trip,” he told me. And so it was, I discovered, on suspiciously peeling back the wrapping inside the airport.

The houseboat went through the x-ray machine without problems, but my backpack drew the attention of a security man. He wanted me to open all the pockets, and discovered a bottle of water that I had forgotten to take out. Instead of telling me I would have to dump it, as security jobsworths do in Britain, he asked me to take a few sips from it. Then he let me take it with me.

When I moved on to passport control, dropping my half-wrapped parcel on the desk while I fumbled for my passport, the immigration officer quipped: “Ah, this one’s bringing us a present.”

Why can’t they be as sensible and good-humoured everywhere?