Caitlin Moran

0:00Today's episode is supported by the podcast Hotels with History. If, like me, you think the most memorable hotels are far more than the beautiful bedrooms and impeccable service, you are going to love this podcast. It's hosted by Richard E. Grant, who some of you will remember from his own Travel Diaries episode, and he hosts alongside travel and hospitality expert Jules Perrone. Together they take you behind the famous facades, the scandals, the secrets, and the guests who turned these buildings into landmarks. You'll find out how Claridge's ended up as the unofficial annex to Buckingham Palace, why a rock concert at Glen Eagles nearly brought down the chandeliers, and what the walls of Mount Nelson in Cape Town, the Mandarin Oriental in Bangkok, and the Waldorf Astoria in New York would say if they could talk.

0:45There are 16 episodes to work through so far, so search Hotels With History wherever you get your podcasts or listen at hotelswithhistory.com. Thank you to Hotels With History.

1:02Hello and welcome to the Travel Diaries podcast. I'm your host Holly Rubenstein and here each week I uncover the seven chapters of my guests' travel diaries. From the first place they fell in love with and their all-time favourite destination to their hidden gem and what's at the top of their travel bucket list. It's wanderlust guaranteed. And I am smiling because this is the first time I filmed my intro. Of course, I've always spoken silently into my microphone at home. But now we are on video, albeit at different points, depending on what app that you use. Apple Podcasts on a Tuesday, hopefully, and Spotify and YouTube on a Saturday.

1:44But yeah, it's really funny to be looking at you guys. This is me. This is how I do my intros. And today I am joined by one of the funniest and most beloved writers we have here in Britain, Catelyn Moran. So Catelyn began writing her first book at just 13 years old. She was published when she was 16 and she quickly became an award-winning columnist for the Times newspaper and a best-selling author of books including How to Be a Woman, More Than a Woman, and What About Men. And her brilliant new book is called How to Be Hopeful, which we talk about on the episode today. It really is a very, very timely book in this current climate and, you know, political climate geopolitically to really think about how we maintain our positive disposition and where travel fits in with all of that.

2:33Can travel really change how we feel or whether sometimes we just simply ask too much of a holiday or of a place to give us that innate shift in ourselves. So Catelyn takes us back to her wonderfully feral childhood summers that she living with her seven siblings in a tiny garavan in Wales. We go from Scotland to Antigua to the Greek islands and Japan. She covers so much. I really, really think you're going to enjoy this episode. I know a lot of you have asked to hear from her since the podcast has began. She's been on my dream guest wishlist and she was every bit as warm and funny and articulate as you would imagine.

3:15So without further ado, let's buckle up and get started. Here's Catelyn. Caitlin, welcome to The Travel Diaries. It is amazing to see you. How are you doing? I am so good. Actually, I'm terrible, but I'm pretending I'm good. We've had our water cut off for the last 24 hours. So you join me. I'm a very thirsty and smelly person right now. And once again, really revealing to me just what a modern miracle it is that you can turn a tap on. Once they start working again, I'm just going to be celebrating and loving the 21st century all over again. So fingers crossed, hashtag pray for me and my tasks.

3:52It is such a pleasure to have you on and congratulations on your wonderful new book, How to Be Hopeful. I have absolutely really loved reading it and actually it's given me a real kind of real food for thought. It's a fascinating book to talk about on a travel podcast because even though it's not a travel book, it starts by asking this really interesting question about whether we sometimes get to a place to to bring about change in ourselves right right exactly yeah so it starts with me thinking that I need to run away so I suspect I I'm imagining at various points in the next couple sentences people will be increasingly nodding along but it feels like for the last 10 or 15 years that things have been increasingly chaotic everything's too much uh talk about the future has become increasingly gloomy we feel increasingly powerless and there's just this general sense that we're living through a terrible time and it's all too much so I very much felt this anyway and then my menopause started which uh as any lady who's gone through it knows doesn't make things better in terms of feeling hopeful and calm and positive um and so my conclusion was that uh civilization was a busted flush and that I was going to run away to the mountains of Wales and live in a self-sufficient farm where I would have my own well and forge my own tools and grow my own food and however screwed up humanity was it wouldn't be my business anymore because i would have started my own civilization on the side of a mountain and in this i was like this is what the people with the money are doing all the tech billionaires have got their little apocalypse bunkers in hawaii in canada so i will just simply do what the rich men are doing and then i found out why it is that the rich men are doing this because it's really expensive to buy a farm in the middle of nowhere and become self-sufficient and i simply couldn't do it so then i was just stuck in my life being me feeling terrible and I had to ask myself the question how without any money or going anywhere or doing anything can I feel better about life in the 21st century and the book is about the year-long quest that I went on to see if it was possible to once again feel hopeful and I have to say spoiler alert it worked and all the things I did have made my life enjoyable again I do feel hopeful so hurrah that's the end of the interview thank you very much for having me goodbye well yeah and as someone who hosts a travel podcast I guess I felt slightly challenged by the book because I was thinking well actually then does do you think that travel kind of genuinely changes us or do you think we ask sometimes too much of it too much of a place that isn't our home oh I mean it's just good I mean even if you just you know go and stay at a friend's house just anything that breaks up the routine is amazing like you know we tend to think travel needs to be going to Macapichu and kind of like you know traversing the world but just going and staying with a friend who lives on the other side of town and waking up in a different bed on a different street uh helps us so i think travel is is very important you want that break from routine go and see what other people are doing in the world and what we tend to do is go looking for difference we want to go somewhere different and meet different people and live a different life and what you notice by day two or three is what you're looking for is the similarities like people are the same everywhere we all have the same priorities we all enjoy nice food we all love our kids we all just want to spark up a conversation with a stranger and find things that are in common so the reason of it right so the reason that we travel is often and we usually get the reverse process by the end we kind of we realize that wherever you travel there you are and then there's the joy of coming home which is always my favorite part of any traveling not just looking out the plane window and going yes Britain is the most beautiful country in the world and that's what cars should look like and that's what fields should look like and this is what a country should look like but also for me as a middle-aged woman the big thrill of putting on the first wash after going on holiday is not to be underrated.

7:34You put on the whites, you put on the darks, you peg them out on the line and that's how you know you're home. You're so right. And I actually look forward to enjoying that. At the moment, there's still a little bit of a sense of dread, but I do think that there are two kind of schools of thought when it comes to getting back home. I'm one of those people that wants to get the wash on ASAP. And there are other people who think that getting that wash on ASAP is completely psycho and that you've just got back and like what are you thinking but are you in team get it on a ASAP oh very much so but I would never want to convert the opposite team to my cause like you you do you like everybody needs to re-enter their normal life how they do but I I adore that moment it's just that kind of I always do the same thing I was put on a wash and then I make a big pan of lentil soup like after a week of kind of eating wherever I've been in the world I've always enjoyed my food but that's my that was my childhood meal of happiness and just once I've once I got the onions frying I can hear the washing machine going I'm like this is the second great bit this is the tail end of the holiday the pleasure of coming back and reasserting all your old traditions again that is lovely I have to say in the book I might be living under a rock but I wasn't actually aware that there were so many subterranean bunkers being built I went I went down like a real worm a kind of google wormhole after I was reading that and and reading about, well, you know, like you said, Mark Zuckerberg's one in Kauai and all of this, like, and it is, it is alarming, isn't it?

9:05Because you're thinking, why are they, why are they, what do they know that we don't? Right. But then what's really interesting. So there's been some really interesting pieces about this. So some investigative journalists have gone to the places and interviewed people who are building the bunkers and also people's or support staff around billionaires. And apparently the question, all the billionaires who are building the nuclear bunkers, the question they ask at some point is if you know if the apocalypse happens if something bad happens we'll be flying out here with our family and our loved ones but also our staff how do we stop the staff turning on us and stealing our resources and slaughtering us and then taking over our nuclear bunkers like should we have secret weapons that they don't know about like kind of like what kind of things can we do to control our staff in the event of an apocalypse and these security guys were like you could try being nice to them so they're your friends and they won't want to kill you and this was this was apparently a revelation to these people super wealthy people they were like what like make my stuff like me like no I'd just rather have a taser and that tells you quite a lot about the mentality of these people that that's their concern oh my god that is so dark I know right so dark well departing far far from from subterranean bunkers we are going to go on a journey today through the seven chapters of your life's travel diaries and we start at chapter one and that is your earliest childhood travel memory what comes to mind for that so we never went away on holiday anywhere so we're so I'm in a three-bedroom cancelling in Wolverhampton it's the late 70s early 80s my parents have started having what will eventually be eight children who were all being raised on disability benefits because my father was disabled and uh so we never go on holiday anywhere until um my grandmother gives us just enough money to buy the cheapest caravan in the world which is then put in a car park on the edge of a caravan site in the middle of wales so it's a very rudimentary caravan site there's like a toilet block and shower box full of spiders and there's a field that you can play in and that's it and the caravan we have doesn't even have a toilet it's just a tin into which we managed to squeeze eventually eight children and then we go there and we stay there from when the caravan site opens on the 1st of april to when the caravan site closes on the 31st of october every year and that's where we live for half the year so oh my goodness so it's not just a holiday it's basically we sort of migrate for the warmer months to wales for half the year and live there and i love that's still my idea of paradise i love wales so okay i have so many questions I didn't realise that you went for such a long stretch of time.

11:46So how was it having, so how did that work with school and everyone's like schooling? So we were home educated. My parents were such big hippies that they took us all out of school in 1986. And we were all taught, I mean, supposedly we were taught by our parents. But in actual fact, they never gave us a single lesson. So we just ran around, often without shoes. By the end of a summer in Wales, we would all have outgrown our shoes and we didn't have money to replace them. So we would grow very thick feet like hobbits. When we all started reading The Hobbit, we were like, oh, we must be hobbits because the hobbits walk around in bare feet all the time.

12:17So our feet would become tough and leathery by the end of the summer. We could walk across at the beginning of the summer. Walking across gravel would make a scream. And by the end of the summer, we could run across it. Our feet had become so tough. It's like asbestos feet. Literally, they were trained. So this is where we would spend the sort of like half the year in Wales. And I still think Wales is the most, you know, I've been lucky enough now to travel to so many places in the world. I've been to Mexico, I've been to Japan, I've been to Iceland, all across America. And I still think Wales is provably and scientifically the most beautiful place in the world.

12:47There is nowhere else like it. It's heaven. And the fact that most people don't seem to know about it, it's still not like a big holiday destination for most people. If you live in the Midlands, it is or in Liverpool, because it's the nearest bit of countryside to those to Birmingham or Wolverhampton or Liverpool. But most people won't go to Wales. And I want to keep it that way. It's so beautiful. can you can you reveal where in wales you'd go so we were so the caravan site was just outside uh the uh the town of trigarine which is right on the edge of the i think it's called force fanoc bog which would often um have um people thought there were lots of ufos there because the way that the mass gashes were released would often make illuminate the bog at night you would see these sort of flashing lights across there so for a while it was a really popular place for people who were looking for ufos to go because the whole bog would be lit up at night with these phosphorescent gases uh-huh it's just a very it's right in the middle of the the caravan site was on the edge of the ruins of the strata florida abbey which had been a massive medieval monastery uh that was then in the reformation torn down so we were kind of walking through these massive ruins of like you know a civilization and a religion that had sort of been brought to its knees and just out in the wild all day watching the birds of prey going overhead um and then we would every so often we'd get into where we had a volkswagen caravanette and we would drive the hour that it took to get to the coast and there was a there's a nature reserve called innislus which is a massive dune system uh and huge the tide goes out about two or three miles in the tide when the tide is is fully um out so we would spend all day following the tide out which took about four or five hours like following the the edge of the water back and back and seeing what was being washed up pools would be revealed and we would swim in them and then when the tide was at its apogee you'd be sort of like two miles out at sea looking back at the land and then you'd slowly walk back following the tide coming back in again and that would be that would be a perfect day in Wales oh how wonderful now I can see where that love of nature that I've read in your in your book and in your articles like that is that where it began oh I mean it's because it's a nature reserve so they had a really brilliant little information center that would explain all the things because you'd find these things washed up on the beach and go what's this there were these weird things that look like tiny circular skulls that were about the size of a fist with these sort of like very mysterious markings on that again look quite alien and odd and those are those are the skeleton of a sea potato so when you find those on a beach you're like what is that and the information told us uh the amazing jellyfish that you'd find washed up occasionally the carcass of a dead sheep which we always find quite exciting to be able to like just look at a sheep and work out how it works amazing seaweeds like you know thousands of tiny fish flying around everywhere and every so often you'd be able to spot um whales or dolphins really far out to see um it's a it's a beautiful place but also you look back now kind of like the classic 70s 80s childhood i look back now and i go we'd be on that beach all day in the middle of summer none of us had sunblock i don't think that had been invented none of us even had water like and i don't think anyone of my generation drank water until the 90s like kind of like it's just no one there was i i don't know how we didn't just burn and desiccate but there was no sunblock there was no water we might have a cheese sandwich uh and you'd just be out on the on the beach all day and our parents weren't there we were completely unsupervised on this beach and it was heaven it was absolutely magic and how how was it all being in one room together for that extended period of time um often quite smelly um we were eating a lot of lentil soup uh we were vegetarians and hippies so it got quite gassy often um but it was but again it's the something really still to this day my favorite sound is the sound of rain on a caravan roof and i think anybody who like you know if you've had a working class childhood in those years everyone remembers the same thing rain on a roof and feeling really cozy rain on a caravan roof the smell in the morning on a caravan site everybody would have bacon and eggs for breakfast so from 7 30 onwards all you could hear was the smell was the sound of very cheap frying pans heating up and frying hundreds of ashes of bacon all over the campsite and just that smell of cut grass and everyone making a fry up in the morning that's the smell of happiness and summer um and so we were very crowded we played a lot of card games we amused ourselves we would tell spooky stories and at night we would go and lie outside on our backs and just look up at the sky and there was so little light pollution in the 80s that the sky would be white with stars like the sky would be mad and dizzy you'd see the milky way i took the milky way for granted in those days i can't remember the last time i've seen the milky way but it was it was it was proper raw beautiful nature and as a child there's just infinite things to amuse you you've got blackberries in september uh you know sort of like experimenting with eating crab apples uh the first frost is always exciting um it's yeah those those rhythms of nature yeah oh how glorious what a picture and so you mentioned that your parents didn't kind of formally educate you in their homeschooling but you became a journalist at a really young age so how did how did that come about like how did that work if you weren't kind of going through the conventional path so so yeah so there my parents view of homeschooling was that there's two kinds of homeschoolers uh the first ones are the people who usually withdraw their children from formal education because they don't think schools maximize education they're like everything should be a learning experience if you went for a walk in the woods then we could teach you about the geology and the geography and the history of the place and we could just educate you 24 7 and school doesn't give you enough education if you bake a cake we could teach you about the physics and the chemistry or whatever and my parents weren't those kind of home educators they were the second kind which are people who just cannot be bothered to take eight children to school at 8 30 in the morning it's too much of a hassle to get all the pants and socks together so we would holly feral and within home education that's called uh child-led education um which is basically kids it's up to you if you want to learn something go and learn And if you don't, you'll be dum-dums.

18:41And there just comes a certain point where you have a completely schedule-less, rudderless, education-less childhood where you just basically wise up and go, hang on, I'm now 12. I know I'm not going to have any GCSEs or A-levels. I'm going to have to work out for myself how I'm going to get a job. Like, I'm going to have to figure that out now. What do I want to do? And I knew from reading books, because we went to the library pretty much every day, that what people would do in the 19th century if they wanted money was right. because that's what joe marsh does in little women and that's what the mother does in the railway children when the children lose all their money so i was like okay i'll become a writer so i started writing my first book when i was 13 and uh got that published when i was 16 and at the same time uh during the two years that it took me to write that book i started becoming really interested in the music of the time kind of indie music of the late 80s early 90s it was just before manchester and so and i found out because i found a copy in a local library that there was a thing called the weekly music press and in those days it was melody maker enemy and then you had sounds as well and then there was the monthlies q magazine select smash hits and i was like i could write a review of a band if they pay you money for this i could write something about music i can describe it so i sent a couple of test uh reviews to melody maker which was my favorite magazine two of them were about cool bands of the day one was about the happy mondays and one was jones addiction but for the third one i wrote about my favorite album which was the soundtrack to the musical Annie and I think they I think these cool leather clad guys that Melody Maker were so amused by the idea of a 16 year old child trying to come and work for the coolest rock magazine in the world by writing a review of the musical of Annie that they were just like yeah give it a go so they would just so I would just so I just found out how you be a music journalist you ring a press officer and say there's a gig in Wolverhampton on Tuesday can you put me on the guest list and then you go with your notepad and you write down your notes and then you go back and you write 200 words about it and then they pay you 28 pounds and 41 pounds um so that was how I started being a journalist I uh I discovered this magic backdoor into journalism and then at the same time the observer were running a yearly prize for the young reporter of the year and I entered that and I won and they were so impressed I'll big myself up for 30 seconds they were so impressed with the piece that I wrote that they went would you like a column in the observer for the duration of the summer holidays and I said yes please and they published five of them there were supposed to be six and they didn't publish the sixth one and I didn't know why so I just took the piece that I'd written that they'd rejected and I walked to the news agents around the corner and I picked up a copy of the times and found their fax number and faxed it to them from the news agents with a note saying I've been working for the observer for the last five weeks but they haven't published this piece would you like it and I walked back home by the time I got home my mum was on the phone in the hallway and she said I don't understand this but there's someone from the times who says do you want a job and I went yes please and they that was when I started being a columnist at the times I was 17 at the time and it was only when I was in my 30s I realized that that's not normally how people get a job as a columnist on free street yeah also that quickly oh my gosh and the rest was history I mean wow that is an amazing story of ambition and self-belief I think think what a wonderful because you have two daughters right I mean what a wonderful thing for them to hear from their mum well I think it's also useful for them as well like because I did send them to school because I was very aware of you know the bad things about being home educated is that you tend to have quite bad social anxiety because you've never learned to talk to people who aren't your siblings also it makes getting your first school crushes quite difficult if you're only at school with your siblings it's like I know it's you know it's a whole thing so um so I I sent them to school, but I think having them knowing my story and my husband's story is quite similar.

22:28He also became a music journalist from a very unpromising background, is that the story is you can find a way through. Like kind of like, you know, there is a sort of official career ladder. But if you sniff around a lot and, you know, enough and find the opportunities, you know, it might be not the usual path or the straightest path. But you can if it's something you really, really want to do, if you are the unstoppable force, you just keep trying enough things until you get to where you want to get to. never take it for granted someone's going to give you something but like you know go out there and just you know send the email send the letter give it a go like you've got nothing to lose like give it a chance no one's ever going to come to you and go I think I think we often think when we're children that someone's going to come up to you one day and go I'm going to tell you who you are and what's going to happen to you next and this is how you must live your life and that's why people buy self-help books and why they follow gurus and why we have religion and all these different aspects of of being a human and the earlier you learn that you don't want someone to come and tell you who you are you want to tell people who you are and you don't want someone to come and say to you this is your job and your future you want to say this is what i want yeah you know it's it's like the difference between a plant that you plant in the garden and allowing something to self-seed if you have made all your choices if you have worked out who you are if you have planted your own seed it always grows stronger like you will if you're living entirely off your own decisions yeah it grows stronger so um so yeah you know never give up you cannot stop the unstoppable force without question.

23:51Today's episode is brought to you in partnership with Airbnb. As you guys all know I spend a lot of time traveling and we've listed our home on Airbnb in the past while we've been away. One particularly memorable time was when we set off on a seven-week road trip across the US. We lived in central London at the time and our flat would otherwise have been sitting empty for all that time so we listed it on Airbnb during the trip. That journey became even more special because it was also when my husband and I decided to get married on a beach in Santa Barbara and we used some of the extra money from hosting on Airbnb to help pay for some really personal touches for the wedding like the flowers from the market that morning and a local photographer who we booked last minute.

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26:02Yes. Well, this is at the age of 18. So I had met my husband when I was 17, and we had briefly gone out with each other. And then I then started presenting a TV show on Channel 4 late at night and my husband said you've just moved to London uh you're just about to become famous and I don't think you should settle down with me right now you need to go out there and date and like you know and if you want to come back to me I will be sitting here and waiting but it would be foolish for you to start settling down with someone now um go out there and you know have your fun and enjoy being famous uh so I went out there and I had my fun and I dated some people and they were all terrible and then after a year I just sort of came back to and went I don't like dating around I want to come back to you please and we he had two weeks of leave left at his job and he hired a car and he made a load of compilation tape so he could listen to music while we were driving and he we just got in the car and he went where do you want to go on holiday we can go anywhere we can drive anywhere and I had not been on holiday since we stopped going to our caravan in Wales when I was 13 and what I'd always wanted to do was go and see what the highlands of Scotland were like so it was the second week of January and we just got in the car and started driving north and that week because we were both music journalists we had been sent the pre-release cassette um for radio heads the bends we were both really big fans of radio head but they were not a cool band at that time they had had creep which is a massive hit and then there had been a backlash to them and people thought they were over and we'd been sent this we were the first journalist to be sent the album the bends and we put it in the car and by the time we got to the third track we were like this is this is going to be one of the biggest albums of all time ever like this this not cool band have just turned into the coolest band on the planet this is crazy how good this is yeah and by that point we were driving across the north yorkshire moors in the middle of the night and there's like snow and sleet coming onto the windscreen and the music's very dramatic like that you know that album the bends is a huge album it feels like interplanetary titanic and we were just sort of screaming at each other going we've never been here before i think we're falling in love with each other this is the best album i've ever heard in my life like this is incredible and we made it to Ullapool that night and we woke up in the morning we got there in a storm and we woke up in the morning we checked into an inn on the side of the harbour and overnight the storm had cleared the sky was blue everything was so crisp one of the unexpected things about travelling is realising that actually the best time to go to Scotland is in the middle of winter the weather is actually really unexpectedly brilliant you get really beautiful clear skies the visibility is amazing and we just woke up on this harbour there were seals swimming in the harbour uh there was on the fishing boats were coming in we were in this bed and it was just I was like I haven't just discovered Scotland like clearly today is the day my new life starts because I think I am in bed with the person I'm going to marry and I think I found my new Vabra band and we're in Scotland and it feels like we're on the edge of the world I'd never seen mountains that big I'd never seen seas that big and uh that that's always been our special place going back to the west coast of Scotland it's incredible up there oh my gosh And so do you go back there still now from time to time?

29:04Yeah, we haven't been there for a while because the kids didn't really like it. Because one day we used to go back there with the kids. And then one day I was like, I just want to climb a mountain. But these children are very small, but they should be able to do this. And the only way that I could get them up that mountain was I said to them, there might be a Disney store at the top of this mountain. And so they scampered up to the top of the mountain. Then when they got there and it was very clear, there was not only not a Disney store, but there was nothing there apart from some rocks and some crows they were they turned upon me and understandably were quite angry and went you said that there might be a disney store up here and i went yes the operative word was might it turns out there isn't one and now we've got to go all the way back down and unfortunately i screwed it up myself because they were so angry about that betrayal but they never wanted to go back there so um so we haven't been for a while but i think one of the best things i think in terms of travel is once you discover the sleeper trains up to scotland because you get on at Euston and you're in the middle of the city and it's the middle of the night and you get into your bunk and you're in you know you're in the middle of like a metropolis and then when you wake up in the morning you're in the middle of Rannock Moor and there are stags staring at you through the window and your breakfast has been served and when you get off the train you're in a completely different country the air smells different and your adventure is just about to start and you did it all while you were asleep like how magic is it that we invented something where you can travel when you're asleep it's incredible so exciting and then would you would you drive from there then further further north yeah get a hire car from fort william and drive and then and i love the for work as well i still have a love for the sleeper trains if i'm on tour doing a book tour yeah you can do the gig do the signing which usually goes until about 11 o 'clock because i love to chat to my fans and they always want to hang around and have a drink in the chat but then i can get the taxi to the train station and there's something especially if it's the last day to the tour you get on the train you go into the diner car which is full of locals there's so many people use that train regularly so they all know each other it's like a little private members club yeah and you get get your haggis and your neeps and tatties and a glass of red wine and the cheese board and as you sort of pull out of the station you know that you're going to wake up back in London and you're back home and you finish the tour and it's just those are those are my favorite journeys the idea that you can sleep overnight and come back to London is so magic yeah I mean I totally agree have you done any other kind of sleeper trains around the world or across Europe?

31:18We've done them down to Cornwall. Yeah, the Riviera Express. Yeah, which is amazing. But I would love to do more. I mean, this is like my husband and I, we've got to the point now where our children are 25 and 22 and we can now start having our own holidays again. And one of the things I want to do is do the sleeper trains all across Europe, particularly around Scandinavia. I would love to do that. So I think that's next on our, I think when we start finally going to the kids, yep, mummy and daddy are having their own holiday now. I think that'll be the first thing we'll do. Yeah, I've released a couple of train travel specials actually and it's really opened my eyes to the kind of routes that are available throughout Europe and the train the sleeper train culture that I actually you know living down in London was not really like familiar with and the ones in Norway in particular that wind through the fjords and past you know incredible lakes and those those I think in particular sound what's definitely on my bucket list so yeah they have ones as well where they kind of stop the train on the middle of the mountain don't they you can get out and walk and then kind of get back on the train again it's so civilized as well I think in Scandinavia in particular yeah it's definitely the place to try it I think if we're venturing beyond the UK um our next chapter Caitlin is is chapter three and that's a place where you learned the most about yourself is there somewhere that kind of fundamentally changed the way that you saw yourself or a perspective on life?

32:43There was, yes, I went on a trip. So this is my, I was much older now. I'd written my first book and I was having to write a screenplay. No, it was my third book. And I was writing the screenplay for the book. And I was co-writing it with a friend of mine who I just didn't know how to write scripts. And he did. So he was like, the best thing to do is go to Antigua and write the script there. And I can, that's been that, why not, why don't we do that? That's what I like to do. and I'd never been on that kind of holiday before I'd never been to the Caribbean he's a very high rolling guy and he was like we will fly business class to Antigua we'll hire a fancy place and I kind of like it's all going to be luxury babe and I was very excited to go I was like I've never had this kind of holiday before I vastly over packed I turned up at the airport with like seven suitcases because we're going to be there for two weeks and he just turned up with carry on he was like babe a chic traveler if you're going to the Caribbean all you need to do is have two pairs swimming trunks some linen trousers and a shirt when you go for sundown cocktails um and as many duty-free cigarettes as you can fit in your bag and he scoffed at my ignorance of these things and i enjoyed flying first class that was lovely being able to lie down in a bed and being given champagne amazing but then we got there and it was all so fancy that i felt completely even though it was so beautiful and you know the classic thing if you're like a working class kid is you know oh a holiday in the caribbean nothing could be more luxurious and it was all really luxurious and that was where I realized I don't like luxury with the place that we were saying was so clean there was so many staff it just felt really fussy I felt really awkward in all the posh restaurants and then there was a night where we were walking along the bay in the city um after drinks and all the private yachts were moored there and some of them were just titanic emblems of doom and evil they were like it was like like the beautiful wooden yachts like that's beautiful two of these were black like dark gray black they look like warships they had clearly been bought by bad people who did not want to have a pretty boat so they were ruining the view like the middle of the caribbean you've got these black warships and then there's this sign on the on the on the harbor side that said rolex retrieval 500 and i was so intrigued by this i went into the shop and went sorry what does this mean and they said uh the rich people have started recently standing on the decks of their boats at night and they all take their rolexes off and throw them into the sea and then they get locals to dive and see if they can retrieve them and there's a competition for whose Rolex gets retrieved first.

35:03Oh, that's not what I thought it meant. That's really weird. No, it's horrible. It's such a terrible use of money. It's such an awful... Imagine going to the Caribbean and like, you know, it's not your country and you're getting the people who live there to like dive for your Rolex that you've thrown overboard. Worth more than most people there would earn in a year. And there was such an instant disparity between the races there. Like it was very obvious that most of the rich people there were white Europeans. The people who lived there were all black and clearly not on that kind of amount of money and just the way that people spoke to them the the history that i like going to a place and finding the history and you know when you're finding out the history of like greece my husband's greek like kind of it's incredibly exciting finding out the history of what happened in greece the history of the caribbean is not fun to find out about like kind of everything you're driving about is that was a slave plantation there's another slave plantation and uh i just it was like what i realized about myself in that holiday i said it halfway through to my friend i was like i love that you brought me here i i'm not i'm grateful i love that you've shown me the world but what i've realized is i would far rather be in wales right now i wish we were in tenby like i mean yeah standing in this luxurious place and i was like i just miss wales i like i like it there so that was where i realized that i am not born to be rich and fancy i am a working class nerdy intellectual bleeding heart liberal girl and i don't like staying on islands that are former slave plantations watching rich people her where relaxes over the side of a boat I I get that and I also now understand your writing and your travel writing a bit better because I one thing I've I've noticed is that you you don't focus on luxury you've kind of you really focus on like the feeling of a place more than yes yeah even if it is objectively luxurious I'm thinking of that um place that you wrote about quite recently in Corfu and looking out to Albania and I mean I imagine that that was very beautiful but like it was not focused on the aesthetic of the building or like oh yes no very much so and like you know even though that was a very lovely villa like a lot you know the luxurious villas there are like 20 ,000 45 ,000 pounds a week to hire and like you know even if I could have blagged it which I had failed to do I would feel uncomfortable somewhere like that with like staff quarters and a helipad and the reason that we go to Corfu is because as a kid I would always read Gerald Durrell and my family and other animals and I was just like I want to see the nature I want to live Gerald Durrell's life while I'm here and also read the history of Corfu and you know sort of like they had links with Egypt there they found loads of Egyptian sort of statues and jewelry in the ruins of the castle up by Cassiope because it was easier to sail to Egypt across the Mediterranean and trade with them than it would be to say you know trade for people in Scandinavia so I love I love imagining the history of places that I go to and understanding why they are the way they are and how people would have lived there in the past so did trap did reading and your love of reading inform you inform the places that you aspired to visit in your like later life I don't yes I don't want to travel and it like the places that I choose to travel to by and large it's because I feel like I've met them in books or I've heard something about them or someone talking about them and then I want to go there and and see what they're like so when I went to Iceland which suddenly became very popular in the 90s all the Britpop generation think they discovered Iceland but the thing that I loved about it most was seeing when you see those houses that are just like a door in the in a big grass hummock and that was apparently Tolkien had traveled there and that's where he bases the Hobbit houses are yeah um so so learning seeing a place through previous travellers' eyes is really exciting to me.

38:41Like, I kind of, I want the gossip, basically. I want to be like, what happened in this country? Who's been to this country? Who's been writing about this country? Like, kind of, I want to get to know the country as a place and a person and a set of values and gossip, basically, rather than, you know, the idea of sitting in an identikit sun lounger being given the same kind of food you can get in an expensive place anywhere in the world is just incredibly dull to me. Like, I just get twitchy. No, I just get twitchy. I'm like, I want to go on an adventure. I want to go and find something. Where are the nerds?

39:07no take me to the place where the nerds are well the the big chapter uh catelyn on the the travel diaries is chapter four which is your all-time favorite destination is it called food yeah i mean we go there every year at least once and often twice because my husband's greek and um so he's just like what is the point of me knowing how to speak greek if we go somewhere where people don't speak greek like it's so beautiful i love the food is great like you know i think most families have with different generations in them will have wildly different ideas of what they want to eat so you know in turn my children have been vegan they've been vegetarian like all these different things and for instance going to france is very difficult if you're vegetarian like kind of they're like chicken is not meat um japan is really difficult if you're vegetarian but in greece to eat vegetarian is to eat incredibly well it's really easy whatever you eat to eat well though it's easy to be gluten-free whatever it is so the food's great my husband can speak Greek uh and it's ravishingly beautiful so um yeah that's probably our favorite place do you know I've been to a fair few Greek islands but I have never been to Corfu where have you been like what's your favorite kind of Greek island well um what's my favorite kind do you know this year well things have changed because I've got two young children so yeah the desire of what we're looking for also has has changed but I have to say that when I read your article about Paxos oh yes that went straight to the top of my bucket list because that sounded quite intrepid I think like I always say that if there isn't um an airport then you know that you're going to get a kind of even more authentic experience of Greece if you can well there's there's two things it's interesting it's like sort of like after we went back to corfu again after going to paxos paxos is ravishingly beautiful and the anti-paxos if you you take the boat out there it has the best beach i've ever been on i mean it just knocks the caribbean into a into a knockout like it's the the water is completely crystal clear it's it's like swimming in in just like a bath of gin it's extraordinarily beautiful yeah but the one thing about paxos is that a certain kind of person is there like every conversation i ever heard was some north london people gossiping about someone they hated at the BBC after a while it was a bit like oh everyone's here like kind of like it's a bit like so it depends how you like that like I loved going there once but then we went back to Corfu after Paxos I was like you know what Paxos is Corfu's bigger there's more to do here it's like kind of people live here all year round and Paxos empties out in the winter like it is sort of very much a tourist right right island yeah and I think if you if you want to go to an Ionian island Corfu's got everything you could have a cheap bucket in spade holiday for sort of flying flop you could have a deeply cultural thing I went on a cookery course there that was amazing coffee of food is really different to any other kind of food it's got lots of kind of like Middle Eastern influences uh the center of it looks like Tuscany but the beaches look like the Caribbean I'm like I think I'm a die-hard Corfu stan in the world I think that's my my ultimate island and if you've got little kids it's so geared up for little kids where where because obviously it's like a relatively big island like where would you recommend staying if you were a first time visitor to coffee i i have now having been to many places i think that's sort of the further north you go it's more beautiful that so basically the east side is quite cliffy so there's not that many beaches so all the beaches are on the west side and i think cassiope which is at the very top the sort of northwest corner it's got like four beaches that are all walkable from the bars and cafes in the area uh there's no super yachts it's kind of it's it just feels very real um it's very beautiful uh the sea is crystal clear the food's great everybody's really chilled there's lots of accommodation options and you can do it without a car you can fly into corfu airport get the bus from corfu airport up to cassiope and everything's walkable really well stopped supermarkets you walk to every beach and you can just save yourself the bother of trying to reverse a car down those often quite scary little roads yeah just walk everywhere with kids it's perfect and there's fireflies there we found fireflies in a field and we just went to look at them every which was magic.

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45:07How would you spend your perfect Corfu day? I would, why is it door? what I really love to try and wake up at dawn because I just think every time you get to see the sunrise in your life like you should never take that for granted and there's particularly in the Mediterranean the Mediterranean is least appealing between like 11 and 4 but the sunlight is so overhead it's quite sort of this it's not beautiful lighting as someone who's now worked a lot of movie sets like it's not the lighting you'd ask for it's too harsh but the morning sunlight is so beautiful this is kind of beautiful kind of simmering silence you can feel the heat is coming up it's slowly rising but if we're so quiet and so clean the dew has made everything fresh so I would rise at dawn I would make a nice coffee and then I would write for three or four hours I actually quite like working on holiday just kind of like it's you're so far away from everything uninterrupted yeah sit on the balcony write for two or three hours then go for a swim then probably have a nap around midday because it's the lighting is unpleasant and it's harsh and then sort of revive around three go for a walk swim in the sea classic taverna if you can swim there's a place that we went to where we swam to the taverna um and i put all my money in my hair i have my hair up in a big updo like amy winehouse if you've got a big beehive you can put your money and credit cards and phone in there swim to the taverna sit there and dry off on the chair eat your chips and then swim back to your house so that would be oh that sounds like the absolute dream i'm i'm absolutely dreaming of going there i was in the ionian islands earlier this year actually i was in Zakynthos or Zante as we called it back in the day.

46:39But I do think that those islands in particular are special because they are so much more green, like they're less arid. Yeah. Well, they're basically like whales after 200 years of climate change. Yeah. Corfu is what whales will look like in 200 years where kind of, you know, where we've risen 2 % in temperature because it's so lush and so beautiful. You will see moss. It's always green even in the heat of summer. um but you you've got mediterranean temperatures and the color of the flowers as well yeah yeah oh god yeah i mean they're going there in spring the wildflowers are incredible so yeah so if you want to know what whales would look like in during a heat wave go to corphe okay noted i really really want to get there so i do um chapter five is your hidden gem so this is a place that you love that maybe my listeners wouldn't know so much about i mean it's it's going to be probably welsh i mean first of all i mean japan isn't a hidden gem but we went and stayed i did a travel piece there and we went up into the japanese alps in spring so if you travel from tokyo yes which is amazing because you get to tokyo in spring and it's all cherry blossom season amazing you get to do your cherry blossom japanese fantasy then if you travel like four hours up to the japanese alps it's the middle of winter it's like full crispy snow and we stayed in the place that john lennon had stayed when he wrote Beautiful Boy for Sean.

47:57And that's where they've got all the thermal springs outside the Ryokans and the monkeys come down off the mountains and sit in the hot water. With the red faces. And have little snowflakes and eyelashes. Yep, those ones, yeah. And that hotel, they will give you, they clothe you, they leave spread out on the bed clothes that would be appropriate for where they are. And because the Japanese believe in seasonal dressing, we were there in spring. So these beautiful kind of like pale moss green trousers, a fold over pink jacket, beautiful white moon boots and then these beautiful capes so you're walking around in these clothes that instantly make western clothes seem so ugly and then you walk out to the raya can which is in the night it's all snowy and crisp and there's lanterns leading the way down the path to this huge open uh open air thermal spring and you sit there looking up at the sky and the stars in the snow lit by lanterns and it's just beautiful i mean that's an otherworldly experience that place um but I you know so I'd never heard people talking about the Japanese Alps before I went there and I just say to everybody that's an unworldly experience did you ski did you ski there I have skied once in my life and it became very apparent very quickly that me and skiing did not get that me too I I have a memory of me on my second day having not learned how to break uh heading towards a school group of about 22 year olds in toddlers in all in one suits in France and I did not know how to warn them that I was about to smash into them and the only French that I knew to scream at these children was pardon monsieur pardon monsieur as I slammed into them uh so yeah I mean skiing don't get on no so most people I imagine go there do they for for skiing or yeah I mean I think a lot were just there for the rye cans for the sparring really really and for for snowshoeing and stuff it was absolutely beautiful and then the other place that i love is abacavani in the in the brecons it's like a foodie centinae um it's so beautiful you're surrounded by mountains but there's a waitrose so you're kind of like however sort of isolated you feel on top of the mountain after a three-hour walk but you know that by the time you get that down to the village if you need to you can go to waitrose and get some very good cheese yeah um it's a very beautiful place so mountains are clearly a place that you feel very like at home yeah I've stopped being I used to be into the sea when I was younger and I think it's mountains and forests now are my favorite place um that's uh I love a mountain I love a hill I love to go up something and back down that gives you a stretcher to the day doesn't it you wake up in the morning you look at a mountain you're like by the end of the day I'm going to know what it looks like I'm where I sit now I'm going to look at it from up there and then I'm going to come back down again and look at the mountain again and it's just quite a simple task to give yourself yeah yeah totally and a sense of satisfaction and achievement exactly yeah exactly and that's that's that's all the structure you need today really isn't it just kind of like yeah I'm going to walk up a mountain down again and if you know if you've walked up and then down a mountain you can have whatever you want for tea you can have five sausages and a bucket full of mash and the mountain has allowed you to do that yeah absolutely well our penultimate chapter catelyn is chapter six and that is the place that you'd never go back to or your worst travel experience oh well obviously antigua was was up there um oh florida yeah i remember this me and my husband decided that we should try and have an exotic holiday before we had kids and we were like you know again working class kids you're like florida that's the dream go to see florida yeah and we flew out there and we'd chosen i mean i still knew enough about myself I was 22 at the time that I would want to be someone with history um so we chose I can't remember what it was called it was like an old Spanish colonial town so it's very beautiful it had history it had architecture it had archaeology but the beat I found all of it very impressive being somewhere where there's a death sentence I think a death penalty I think is weird being somewhere where people have guns you know if we're British we're just not used to these things it's quite alarming um there was a sort of humid kind of unpleasant the food was terrible everything smells of corn syrup everywhere you go the food is just there's no nutrition there it's a nutritional desert and we were just sitting on this beach where the sand was like talcum it was like talcum powder white the sea was sparkling blue there was this flock of pelicans that were right in front of us and it should have been mesmerizingly beautiful and again i found myself i seem to have said this about seven times during this podcast but i just sat there in this beautiful place going I wish we were in Wales and we we we cut the holiday early and went home really Florida wow yeah it's the only time I've ever done it I was just like this again I don't like the history of this place I don't like the feel of it like kind of also I don't do well in the heat I should have really thought of that before I went to Florida but I'm a Celt like I'm half Welsh half Irish there is nothing in my DNA that can prepare me for being in in the blaring sunlight all day I need to be bathed in a constant mist of rain in order to feel comfortable so Florida retrospectively was a really bad idea but at that age you're still experimenting you're like maybe i'm the kind of person who likes to go to florida and you're fine tuning now what your travel taste is yeah i need trees i need moss i need rain i need some good food i need some brilliant history it must be liberating to not care about if it rains oh it's amazing exactly i mean it does annoy other people when you sort of wake up in the morning you're going yippee it's raining yeah but it's i think also because i'm into gardening obviously you know i do the gardening podcast snow and stuff and I've rewilded my garden and it I find it quite stressful to be somewhere where it hasn't rained because I'm just looking at the trees and the plants going you're not happy are you like you you would really like it to rain well I mean case in point right now here in London right exactly and that becomes quite distressing after a while so um so yeah I like somewhere where nature is being watered constantly oh well it has been such a joy to chat to you Catelyn we are on to the final chapter of your travel diaries chapter seven and that is a destination that's at the top of your travel bucket list i where would i like to go um i really want to do scandinavia i keep saying this to the kids i just want to kind of i want to do a walking holiday we did a walking holiday once in austria uh through the mountains and the kids were really little and they had mules so that whenever the kids got tired they could sit on the mules and kind of get a lift and then carry on walking and we would like fall asleep in the haylofts of these inns then wake up morning and dawn would be coming up and it all looked like heidi and we'd be eating hard boiled eggs and hot chocolate for breakfast and then just walk to our next village and that was very beautiful and i'd love to do the same thing but in scandinavia because austria was very beautiful but the food was terrible everything is covered in it was mainly potatoes and mayonnaise and horse they eat quite a lot of horse meat in austria and that was quite difficult to explain to the kids especially when you're like riding on them at the same time literally this although to be fair they hated the mules so by the end of it they would have quite happily eaten them they found the mules to be to be very peevish creatures but um so yeah i'd like to do a walking holiday um uh around scandinavia just walking my dream is that one where you wake up in the morning and they send your luggage onto your next destination and you spend the day walking from the place you slept last night to the place you'll be sleeping tonight and once again you know you can eat as many sausages as you want and there's just something very lovely about going on a on a journey like kind of like walking through the landscape and really understanding it watching the rivers turn into the sea watching the hills turn into the mountains watching the geology change imagining the people that have walked these paths for thousands of years and what news was taken along them who was running down that path to tell someone something the king is dead we've been invaded um these are the things that i think about when i'm walking ancient paths brilliant oh well i hope that you make that dream a reality very soon oh you darling thank you so much i will i hope you come with me oh i i would adore to thank you catelyn moran those were your travel diaries it has been a real joy thank you so much our huge thank you to catelyn for joining us on the travel diaries really really enjoyed that and her book how to be hopeful is out now available in all good bookshops and thank you so much for listening today if you'd like to be alerted whenever a new episode of the travel diaries is released then please do hit follow or subscribe on your podcast app it's free and it means that you get a double dose of wanderlust in your podcast library each week.

56:08Come and join us on Sunday for the Travel Diaries Unpacked, our new second episode each week. And this one on Sunday is going to be really, really good because we are unpacking the world's 50 best hotels list, which has just been released. And it causes all kinds of conversation in the travel world. I'm interviewing the European chair, Lauren Ho, and she has been, she basically lives in hotels. She goes from hotel to hotel to hotel and her life is just insane. you'll see if you follow her on Instagram and it would just be really interesting I think to kind of hear a little bit more about how this this comes together and more about her if you want to follow me on Instagram and TikTok you know where I am I'm at Holly Rubenstein if you have any questions it's thetraveldiariespodcast at gmail.com thanks so much for listening guys have a wonderful week safe travels and I'll be back on Sunday

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