Your first problem, then, is the Gare du Nord porter,

repre- sentative of his kind all over ,Europe. You may not need a porter: but Mary undoubtedly will. Remember, then, that porters on the Continent are paid by the piece; and that the payment is the same whether the 'piece' is a cabin trunk or a hand bag. If, as I surmise, Mary is bringing several small pieces, it is unwise to imagine that the porter will shoulder them for nothing, just because they are small. On top of his legal rate (which you will find posted up at all stations), the porter will expect a tip. There is no general rule for tipping, I fear. In some places— Naples leaps to the mind—it does not matter how much you give. The porter will look at the money with a half-aggrieved. half-incredulous air, and hand it back to you, protesting that it is utterly inadequate. He knows that nine English tourists out of ten will pay more, to avoid a scene. You will undoubtedly do the same. I do not blame you. In any budget estimates you may make, therefore, you will have to allow for unnecessarily high tips. It is wasteful; it is cowardly; it is unfair on future tourists; but there is no point in getting involved in scenes until you are sure of yourself.

to the nearest round number—i.e., if your bill comes to 4s. 7d., leave 5d. Where the proprietor runs his own bar leave nothing, but offer him a drink occasionally, if you are a regular.

The Parisian taxi-driver has an unjustifiably poor reputation in England; he will prove to be neither maniacal nor extor- tionate, as a rule, in ferrying you to your hotel. counts. Test the bed: see that the pillow (more usually, bolster) is not stuffed with kapok : assess the chances of quiet (Paris, less noisy than it was, is still hard on English cars); make sure that the running water runs (the stories that you have heard about French plumbing are not exaggerated); and choose.

But this, as I say, should be done the next morning. On your first evening, you will want simply to deposit your luggage. and to go out to the nearest boulevard café, to sip your aperitif in (I hope) a mood of exultant anticipation.

You may not take to French-type apéritifs straight away; sherry is not a French habit; cocktails are usually vile and always expensive. A dry white wine is a good and cheap alter- native, until you develop a taste for vermouth. French beer— particularly Alsatian beer-7-is better than its reputation (inci- dentally, at many cafés, particularly in the country, they imagine that the English tourist will not drink French beer. They will give you imported lager, out of bottles encased in opulent silver paper, at 3s. or 4s. a time, unless you watch out). When you wish to keep up the amiable pretence that you are not a toper. Mary, or when you are thirsty, I would suggest citron presse, squeezed fresh lemon, which for some reason or other tastes very much better on the Continent.

For Clinner, make your way across to the Left Bank : that is, the other side of the river from the Champs Elysees. the Opera.

and the Louvre. Forbear to try one of the starred restaurants of the Guide Michelin; it will be time enough for them when you have become cursed with the gourmet's fond illusions. Go to St. Germain-des-Pres : within a radius of half a mile you can find many small restaurants where you can dine for 7s. or less. Certain general rules will help yciu in your selection. Ignore restaurants on a boulevard : they are expensive or bad or both. Pass by those agreeable-looking places hedged around with shrubbery or steeplechase fencing : a glance at the prices will explain why. Turn off down any unpromising side-street, and you will probably find a sympathetic-looking little restaurant, its doorway flanked by elegant woodwork, its curtains and tablecloths chequered in gay red and white. Avoid this, too.

for the same reason. Further on you will find something more dingy, with no flim-flam outside or in. Examine the menu dis- played outside (if no menu is displayed, walk on), paying particular attention to the cost of the plats, or main dishes— the entrecôtes, escalopes and steaks. For your purposes, they should average between 3s. and 5s.

You may feel—many people do—that it is not quite right to examine menu and restaurant in a detached and critical fashion, passing on elsewhere if you are not satisfied. But once you have acquired the habit, it becomes one of the special pleasures of Paris—this evening meander in search of that little-known, but sympathetic, restaurant. You will quickly develop a sixth sense about them; but the chief thing to remem- ber in the initial stages is that very small, unpretentious and obscure restaurants can provide meals that put Soho to shame. I say 'can, because tourist pressure is increasing, and a varia- tion on Gresham's Law applies to French cooking. But good

or bad, the pleasure of discovery counts for much; and in any case the evening meander is delightful.

I nearly forgot: a carafe of wine. Still, it will cost you only a few pence. Until you develop a palate (and sometimes even then) it is better value than wine by the bottle. As a rule, the red is safer than the white.

Wait for your coffee until you are back in a boulevard café, again, when you can sip it at leisure. The tide of fashion for cafe society ebbs and flows : before the War we used to go to the ponze and the Rotonde in Montparnasse: after it, to the Deux Magots and the Fiore in St. Germain-des-Pres. Either of these centres is better value than the more fashionable Right Bank rookeries in the Champs Elysees. the Opera. or Montmartre, which you should defer visiting until you feel at home in Paris, and can sneer in comfort. Of course. Montparnasse and St. Germain-des-Pres are full of tourists too. It is cheaper and more independent to go to some small near-by bar mbar:. But I rather think you'll tend to find yourself, in spite of what you say about their customers, at the Deux Magots or the Dome.

If you should find a suitable bar tabac, it is there that you get your stamps as well as your cigarettes. People say that there are post offices in Paris, but you are unlikely to see any. Gauloises are the standard cigarette : if you must have English type, but don't want to pay import prices, there is 'High Life,' pronounced to rhyme with figleaf.

nit ttee

I do not imagine you will want to hit the night spots on your first evening in Paris; but if you do. it is worth inquiring in the St. Germain-des-Pres area, because there are a dozen or so small boites de null where you can dance. or watch a small (and sometimes spontaneous) show for the price of a drink. An expensive drink, admittedly—perhaps 8s. or 10s.—but you can sit for an hour or more over it. I do not know if the existentialist night clubs still flourish : they were tourist traps, boring and hideously expensive.

If Pigalle tempts you, reflect that the cost of one night's entertainment will be the equivalent of a week's holiday.

Do not have breakfast in your hotel : your coffee and crois- sants will taste better, and cost less, in the local café. I would search the same area around St. Germain-des-Pres for your room that you explored for your dinner, there are dozens of small hotels, and you should get into one of them for between 6s. and 10s. a night with no difficulty. Always, everywhere on the Continent, make sure that the terms you are offered at a hotel are inclusive. Otherwise you may find yourself paying up to a third as much again, with service, taxe de sejour, taxe de municipalite, and plain taxe.

It is a good idea to visit the local market, or food-shop centre. A crusty loaf: butter, cheese, tomatoes, pâté or cold meat, fruit and a bottle of yin ordinaire; your hotel owner does not mind you bringing them back to your room. And you might as well start cultivating the siesta habit afterwards. Misery at first—the waking up, that is— but worth it.

Mefto

second class ticket: that can be expensive, if you are caught.

You can get a carnet for bus journeys, too; but on buses you pay according to distance travelled (other things being equal, in fact, use the bus for short and the Metro for long journeys). If you sat outside the Deux Magots on your first evening you'll have seen waiting passengers arming them- selves with what appear to be free tickets out of a machine at the bus stop. These are numbered slips, designed to obviate the need for a queue; you have to be quick off the mark to make use of them, as the conductors call out the numbers with consistent unintelligibility.

You say that you have not yet made up your mind where to go after Paris; but that you certainly intend to laze for a spell somewhere on the Mediterranean. For the journey south- ward, do not be put off by the old warnings that the third class seats are wooden benches; they are not, except on local lines, and if you are travelling by night you can get a third class sleeper or a couchette reasonably cheaply. Restaurant car meals are expensive; on the Continent travellers tend to buy food beforehand to bring with them.

eOte d' What is there to say about Cannice. or Cap Maugham? Very little! You will eat, and sleep, and lie in the sun, and bathe : that is all. But I beg of you. wherever you go for your sun, to remember to take it in moderation on the first day or two. If there are expeditions to be done in the district, the first two or three days is the time to do them. If you leave them to the end you'll never do them, because by that time you'll be too busy trying to toast yourself to an even tan all over.

And now, a word about the French themselves. The first thing that will strike you about them is that they are an abrupt, even a rude race of people. They are intolerant of tourist frailties. They will rarely—unlike the Italians—be pleased by your efforts to speak their language : on the contrary, they are likely to pretend not to understand even when they really do. Do not be misled by their apparent lack of sympathy into thinking that they are hard, or disagreeable. They will not take you to their hearts effusively, Italian fashion : but they will prove interesting and stimulating friends. Try not to be too English: do not, for example, expatiate on the benefits of stable governments, by contrast to the vagaries of French politics. The French are highly critical of their own govern- ment, but, convinced as they are that theirs is the land where true civilisation flourishes, they resent criticism of it from foreigners (though they may not show it at the time). Finally, remember that speaking correctly is important in France. To use colloquialisms of whose meaning you are uncertain is the surest way to expose yourself to ridicule. Use school-book French. Better 'la plume de ma tante' than larding your con- versation with out-of-date slang. Let me say for a start that Italy is much easier than France. True, you know no Italian, but that makes no difference. It is delightfully easy to pick up the few words needed, and no Italian minds your using the infinitive of a verb in all circumstances, to convey your meaning (a Frenchman would recoil in disgust). Italians are delighted to help you; and although tipping is generally on the same basis as in France, you can get away with much less if you are nice about it Friendliness goes down well; spontaneit% and warmth are so welcome that it is some times better to make promises and not carry them out than to be correctly and formallv unco-operative.

Because the Italians are so much more approachable, it is important that you, Mary, should understand them from the start. You will find the men full of a curiosity which in an Englishman you would think impertinence. They are so amiable and so forthright that it will be difficult for you to judge if they are being sociable or some- thing quite different. Whichever it is, do not react by shyness or hostility : play them at their own game. In Italy the important thing is to be 'simpatico': if they feel that about

you, the rest is easy. • You may have heard that there is strong anti-British feeling in Italy. That is true : but it is feeling ,against 'the British' as an abstraction, not against individual Britons, who are popular—very much the same situation, in fact, as you get in Ireland. As compared with Germans, you will find your- self most welcome. Last summer saw a wave of them revisiting Italy. As the German tends to despise Italians (and he is not very good at concealing his contempt) much ill. feeling followed.

I cannot think that there is anything par- ticular to watch out for about Italian hotels : but restaurants are very different to those you will have become accustomed to in France. To begin with, there is not the vast difference in standards and prices be tween the different grades. In France the same dish may cost anything between 2s and 15s. in different restaurants: in Italy the variation is, as a rule, much smaller. Do not rush to buy spaghetti : you will get your fill. The Italian is a gourmand, where the French are gourmets : he likes to stuff him- self with spaghetti to begin with, and then round off his meal with more delicate dishes

An attempt to follow his example will not be welcomed by your digestive system.

In the .same way, the Italian likes wine, but he does not fuss about it. There is no snobbery, as there is in England; no ritual; no fuss about vintages. If he likes his red wine cold, he drinks it cold. A mistake which visitors tend to make is in imagining that 'Chianti' is a synonym for 'Italian wine.' It is not : Chianti is the wine of a district; it will cost you conOderably more than the wine of the locality, which may be just as good, or better. Italians do not drink as much as Frenchmen, on the whole; and drunkenness is considered socially unfor- givable. -Even merriness is frowned on: English drinking ways are considered shock- ing; so is the idea that the capacity to 'hold' liquor is in some way manly.

I do not need to tell you about Ifalian coffee: espresso bars have doubtless educa- ted you already. Bars in Italy tend to have coffee as their mainstay, where an English pub would have draught beer. You will save yourself money by realising that if the cost of a drink standing up at the bar is Is., then it may cost you 2s., 3s. or even 4s. to have that drink brought to you at a table. At some bars you have to pay before you get the drink; but at most--as in France—you pay nothing until you get up to go. It is consequently remarkably easy but inadvis- able, to forget that you have not paid.

The chief difficulty you will find in Italy, I would guess, is in deciding how to divide your time between taking the sun and seeing the sights. If alternate hot and cold days could be arranged it would be easy, but sight-seeing through the heat of a normal day is, to my mind, a form of senseless masochism.

When you are strong-minded enough to go on an expedition to, say, some famed museum or gallery, you will invariably find it is shut, either because the day is some kind of holiday, or because you have come out of hours, or for no published mason. Get the days and times of opening in advance : and present yourself, if possible, at opening time. It will be cooler, and the conducted tours may not have arrived.

Not that you should sniff at the conducted tour. As a means of getting a quick look around, a 'trailer' as it were, of a district or a country, it can be most useful. Italy, after

S,certe

all, is a country of widely varying tourist attractions : how are you to know whether you prefer Maggiore and Garda to the riviera or the Bay of Naples, or Florence to Rome, unless you take a swift look around the lot? And you can take a swift look around much more easily and cheaply through one of the uncountable tours, national, provincial, and local, that are offered throughout Europe.

But if you decide to plump for a place in the sun to stay for a fortnight or more, rather than to travel, a couple of words of advice Avoid staying in towns, if you can They are almost invariably over-full in the summer, and over-full Italian towns, espec- ially if they are 'discovered' nouveaux riches fishing villages, can be quite horrible. And do not necessarily be attracted by the brochures' alluring beaches. There are some magnificent stretches of sand in Italy, but all too often the plage that looks so gay in a brochure turns out to be the size of a suburban back garden. And as the Mediter- ranean is virtually tideless, this beach is not washed twice a day. At best it may be hosed occasionally by the local corporation, in a fruitless endeavour to remove the accumula- tion of peach stones, sea wrack and cigarette butts.

In the neighbourhood of volcanoes, too —the Bay of Naples, for example—the sand tends to be the colour of what comes out when you empty a vacuum cleaner. In short, aim at finding a hotel a little way outside a town, with rock bathing attached. There are plenty of them; cheaper than the French equivalents: not as a rule so good, but more entertaining.

Travel : there are four distinct types of train—aecelerato. diretto, direttissimo, and rapid°. in inverse order of speed and importance. The rapid° has no third class, and you have to buy a special supplemen- tary ticket to use it. Bus travel is a lot cheaper than train, but it is also more un- certain: there is no nonsense about 'four standing passengers only,' and buses con- tinue to fill until they threaten to split at the seams. As for trams! There are often almost as many people hanging on outside as would ,fill an ordinary English car. You require hardihood for such voyaging; if Mary is with you, stick to the train, except for local trips.

Dress in Italy is simple but in towns rather formal. Bohemianism is not appre- ciated. English men's clothes are admired, but not those normally worn in Italy; to discard your jacket—as you will be tempted to do in a city's heat—marks you as a tourist. How much or how little to wear depends upon the locality. In some places two-piece bathing dresses for women are frowned on; in others it is forbidden to cross the road in bathing costumes, and villainous beach huts are provided as the alternative. But in other places—particu- larly those where English and French tourists congregate—these rules tend to disintegrate: you may even see a bikini. You will just have to judge for yourself.

Sight-seeing is apt to be marred by unsavoury guides , whose volubility is excelled only by their incompetence. If you plan to visit, say, Pompeii, it is better to work out from some guide book what you want to see and insist, resolutely, on seeing it, without a guide if possible. If you want to look at a church, Mary, you may be asked to put some covering on your head, but very often a plea of innocence of the rules will get you by. The Italians are very casual in their attitude to their church : affectation of piety is considered ridiculous, and the ordinary priest gives himself no airs —a marked contrast with Spain and Ireland.

If you want to be really well looked after in Italy, borrow a baby! The Italians are daffy on the subject of bambinos; their children are loved, caressed within an inch of their lives, and are rarely corrected. Old people, on the other hand, are pushed around callously, and made to slave for their keep.

If it is sensible, in Rome, to do as the Romans do, it is absolutely essential in Spain to do as the Spanish do, should you wish properly to understand and enjoy a stay in their country. The Spanish, as you will have been told, are a proud people, and they do not make allowances for tourist frailty (like the Italians), or ignore it (like the French).

You will find Spanish manners beautiful. In France and Italy, I should have warned

you can see in the late nineteenth-century numbers of Punch; and I believe that the law still forbids men to wear either shorts or trunks. As in Italy, it depends where you go.

It is not easy to make general recom- mendations for travel in Spain. Standards vary greatly in different districts. Trains are in general less comfortable than in Italy, less efficient than in France; buses are very often more modern and—because they do not take such eccentric routes as the trains—more serviceable.

Train travel is further complicated by the fact that if you want to go anywhere, it always seems necessary to go via Madrid —and not direct; the lines zig-zag from town to town. Special trains, which seem the answer to your prayer, may turn out to be first class only. Trains do not linger in stations; they are away again before you have had time to reach the buffet. And do not imagine when you arrive at the railway station for X that you are actually in X; you may be a long distance away, and unless you look slippy you will miss the station bus that will take you there. Local trains are great fun, for short journeys. Your carriage is likely to be full of live- stock, or deadstock, and do not be alarmed if a head pops in through the window en route; tickets are Sometimes examined by an inspector walking the running board.

That reminds me: documents are required for every journey, for everybody. You must have your passport to hand. Carry it always on the Continent, unless you are simply going\ across the road to the beach. It is Sometimes needed; always it is a form of insurance. Wherever you go, too, you will be required to put the number of your passport on miscellaneous forms.

Sight-seeing is cheaper than in Italy : the cost of going to museums, galleries, etc., is small. In any case you may be able to get a free pass from the Spanish Ministry of Education to all State institutions of this kind. Churches are more difficult. You have to find out who can give you authority : and they have to extract the key from an elusive caretaker. You, Mary, must be properly dressed. A friend of mine tells me she was asked at one church to wrap handkerchiefs round her bare legs: at an- other she was lent cuffs to cover the ends of her arms.

I do not know that there is anything to say about Spanish food, except that it is apt to lie heavy on the stomach of the newcomer; in Spain (and, indeed, in Italy) it is advisable to have at hand some known pill or potion against the colic, in case of need. This will also come in handy should you•pick up a germ from the water supply. The hazards of drinking tap water have been largely eliminated in continental cities, but in villages it may still be wise to do your teeth in Vichy water, or the Even if you do not have time to stay in Switzerland, you should certainly try to travel through it. It is pleasant to be able to tell you that there is nothing to warn you against. Everything is laid on; the only thing you can possibly suffer from is not knowing the extent of the benefits available.

To give but one example: the informa- tion department of the telephone system will tell you anything and everything you want to know—the time of a church ser- vice, the weather forecast, the location of the nearest garage dealing with repairs. On the Swiss telephone system, incidentally, you can dial anywhere in Switzerland direct. No TOL, no TRU !

The Swiss arc not an approachable people. You are unlikely to have time to break through the barrier that divides the visitor from the resident. Tourism to them is a business, at which they are extremely efficient. If you like your holidays on those terms, nothing could be better.

. . and iluiktict

Another possible choice for you would be Austria, one of the cheapest countries in Europe for the visitor. Above all, you should go to Vienna, and for this, since Austria is still occupied territor!', you will need a special pass.

Once there, you will find that you have 'plenty to do; the museums arc some oi the best in Europe, the restaurants are cheap and the night clubs gay, though not many Austrians can afford to go to them nowadays, Nostalgia, indeed, is the key- note of Austria and, if you are inclined to feel some irritation at the numberless people who will talk to you of the Habs- burgs, you should remember that not every country has seen itself reduced from the position of a great empire to compara- tive impotence in five years of history.

Apart from Vienna, there are a 'number of good centres. The lake district called the Salzkammergut is particularly attractive, that tickets for the festival events are expensive by any standards).

Continued from page x

9Aeland

There are many other countries which I can see that I will not have time to mention : I must content myself with one, and grateful remembrance of things past demands that it should be Ireland. To be sure, Ireland is not 'abroad' in the continental sense : you do not even require a passport to travel there. But it has a distinctive flavour, as unmistakable as the tang of its national beverages—stout, whiskey (with an `e'), ginger ale (invented in Belfast), soda water (invented in Dublin) and 'poteen' (distilled from potatoes, yeast and sugar, laced with sheep-dip—'not a drop is sold till it's seven days old'). It has one tourist disadvantage, which it shares with Britain; the weather. For that reason I have always envied anglers, golfers and other sportsmen who contrive to enjoy themselves in conditions that leave me by the fireside. There are few cheaper or better countries for the traveller who likes to mix with his sight-seeing the occasional round of golf, or a day's fishing—both of which most of the good hotels around Ireland are able to provide.

You should stay in Dublin for a while. I know of no city that has a more sympathetic air; and if you have one or two introductions in your pocket (or even if you haven't) the hos- pitality is formidable. Tear yourself away from it resolutely, and go to the West of Ireland for a few days, to Connemara, or Kerry, or Donegal. There you will find . . . but I fear that descriptions of the scene would sound fulsome: you had better go and see for yourself. Good luck to you both, and may your tour be the first of many. Your affectionate PS.—You ask where I intend to take,my own summer holi- days. On a cruise! They have much to recommend them, provided that you bear two things in mind. The first is that it is sensible to take a cruise to places that you are unlikely to see in the normal course of holidays. I am not merely thinking of the Canary Islands, or even Athens, Alexandria, or Algiers, though you might wonder whether you will have the opportunity to see them simply because of their distance from base. There are also countries like Norway, nearer at hand, whose delights you may taste satisfactorily from a ship. My second piece of advice is that you should not allow yourself to become too involved in the social round of the ship. I would not like you to emulate the young man in (I think) Punch who was sorry to miss the Acropolis, but had to play off the deck tennis semi-finals that afternoon. I myself would ban all deck games; but then I would also ban all visits to places for sight-seeing purposes. My ideal cruise would go placidly to nowhere, provided that it offered sun, and sleep, meals and more sleep.. . That is quite enough!