Baltic, Gothic, Brothers Grimm, Hanseatic League, pagan forests, schnapps and herring – I have increasingly bought into Jonathan Meades’ championing of what he called the Magnetic North in his 2008 BBC documentary with that title. This spring I’ll be off to Utrecht and Lübeck – and hopefully my beloved Berlin – to further consecrate my soul to Northern Europe.
Meades’ brilliant two-parter was a defiant debunking of our British obsession with its polar opposite, the Mediterranean: “The South; we all want to be there. It’s an ideal that draws us to it. It’s a mythical place …The south causes the North to suffer a collective delusion about itself, we deny our Northern-ness. We deny it to such an extent we’re unfamiliar with those countries which share our climate.”
His splenetic case against the Med was amplified when he included the full text in his selected essays, Pedro and Ricky Come Again (Unbound, £30).
“To Britons today the south is exuberant vines, guiltless hedonism, excitable olives, the immemorial ruins of immemorial civilisations, primary-coloured emotions. It’s a promised land. We vertically tan in order to look southern – oranges do come from the south, from Valencia and Seville. And, of course, an orange patina covers up blue skin when you’re wearing next to nothing in snowbound Newcastle because you believe you’re still in Ibiza. Or wherever.
“British architects are forever going on about remaking run-down Pennine towns as Tuscan hill villages. Barnsley is really San Gimignano. Todmorden is uncannily akin to Pienza.”
I take his ironic point as I consider this in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, my home town for 40 years (and never likely to match Pienza’s UNESCO World Heritage status). Still we have miraculously avoided snow bombs and 99mph winds to rock up on a January Monday morning that is undramatically penumbral and drenching.
In front of me is The Mediterranean (£37.50 from any good bookshop or via this link), a siren call tempting me to Meades apostasy. A coffee table extravaganza whose 250 beautifully illustrated pages explore the “stories and secrets of the Mediterranean Coast”.
At my elbow I have a “beaker full of the Warm South”, a glass of Xinomavro red from near Thessaloniki – one of the Lonely Planet’s top seven off-the-beaten-track destinations in this new publication. Here is my own verdict on Greece’s second city , praised by Lonely Planet for its “bar hopping culture and gastronomy rivalling any in the Med.”
The other cities in focus include marvellous Med melting pots that have higher profiles – Marseille (where the contradictory Meades himself now lives) and Napoli. My digital report on the city of Maradona, Margherita and Vesuvius has vanished into the ether, but for me offshore Ischia (and its wonderful lemons – main picture) was the kind of island surprise that features heavily in this book. Which bizarrely neglects this setting for The Talented Mr Ripley – shame on them.
So what exactly is Lonely Planet celebrating?
Not all the obvious over-touristed destinations and when it does feature them it is keen to stray off the beaten track, enlisting a cast of local chefs, architects, curators and craftspeople – to “share their secrets” of 30 different cities. The scope is ambitious, so surface scraping is inevitable, but it had this much-travelled reviewer jotting down a bucket list. Put me down for an abundance of lemons, olives and wine.
Who knows? In 2026 or 2027 I might find myself in another of the ‘magnificent seven’, Brač off the coast of Croatia. relaxing by the Adriatic on the stunning Zlatni Rat beach, or hiking to Vidova Gora, the highest point in the Adriatic islands. If city breaks aren’t your focusThe Mediterranean also suggest 15 weekend-long road trip itineraries.
In these difficult times globally it is good to be reminded of the wonders of intelligent, independent travelling. When the Med has so much to offer who needs the hassle of Trump’s hostile American borders? I for one won’t be renewing my Esta any time soon.
• All the images are my own (apart from Thessaloniki), not from the book