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.