When things don't go to plan

The moments in travel that don't make it to print + tips from my Lyon trip + recommended reading

The time when I stood on the beach and the bottom of my trousers got completely drenched by an unexpected wave and had to wring them out before going into a very posh restaurant in Nice.

I was listening to fellow writer Felicity Cloake on my favourite food podcast this week, Cooking the Books with Gilly Smith, and she was talking about her new book Peach Street to Lobster Lane and how her love of ‘winging it’ means she often finds herself in situations that makes for great stories and her lack of planning is the secret ingredient in her wonderfully witty books (including her French cycling odyssey One More Croissant for The Road). Although I love planning trips, that’s not to say that things haven’t gone wrong for me over the years and have either resulted in amusing consequences (sometimes we only saw the funny side afterwards) or what we might call ‘a learning experience’. It has meant in many cases the story or the parts of a story I hoped to write didn’t ever make it to print.