Who would have thought of staying in a factory? My view is of a grey industrial building, a gravel pile and a crane  standing like a metal giraffe at the end of the pier. It’s not your usual picture-postcard hotel vista, but it’s oddly beautiful. Instead of following the masses to the Mediterranean, we had headed north to the Baltic islands off Sweden’s coast. Gotland is Sweden’s biggest island, and it’s here that the Fabriken Furillen hotel sits, on a remote peninsula in the far northeast of the island.

It was lust at first sight and love after the third martini. Over a get-to-know-you-dinner I discovered all I needed to know: I had found the Perfect Woman. All the boxes were ticked and the taxi was winding its way to my bedroom when she said: ‘You should know that I’m bisexual.’ She must have seen the frown on my face because she quickly added, ‘But everyone is bisexual.’ ‘No. I’m not,’ I said gently. ‘Yes you are,’ she insisted.

In the bar of the Hotel Suisse, perched above the lake in Kandy (pictured), high up in Sri Lanka’s Hill Country, a driver touting for business smiles to reassure me that the British ‘left us many good things’. Trains, roads, the English language. And cricket, I remind him, ‘Oh yes, sir, cricket.’ I wonder what he says to French or Australian tourists. The Hotel Suisse was used as Louis Mountbatten’s South-East Asia Command headquarters in the second world war; these days it has something of the feel of an old-fashioned and slightly eccentric English prep school.

My frail elderly mother has recently moved in with us in Epsom and in so doing has joined the 15 million people worldwide who spend their days sorting through rubbish. Mum, however, does not get paid $1 a day. She does it for nothing. This is because we now have five separate bins and every morning she and the other 10,000-plus members of Surrey’s army of housewives sort through their rubbish to make sure it all goes into the right one.

Yad Vashem, Israel’s vast Holocaust memorial complex, dominates a hillside above Jerusalem, surrounded by bare rock and pines. Vast though it is, it manages to be both harrowing and restrained; both rooted in the times it commemorates and thoroughly modern — not just in style, but in the way it harnesses the most advanced technology to its cause. As an enterprise, let alone a monument, it is impressive: a testament to the commitment of Israel and the survivors of Europe’s Jewry to ensure that what happened is never forgotten.

Call me a trencherman or worse, but I tend to think of the Dordogne as a giant restaurant-cum-farm shop, set in a wooded riverside picnic park. And I have a feeling that’s how its native residents think of it too, so central is the well-filled table to their traditional way of life. ‘Dordogne’ of course refers both to the department of south-west France and to the river, famous for the medieval châteaux along its cliffs, that rises in the Massif Central and flows into the Gironde near Bordeaux.