"You get away from real life. It's like this lovely bubble: you're away from Dublin and the noise and the traffic. It's very peaceful. It's very rural," says novelist Patricia Scanlan.

"We see the seasons: the planting and the sowing, then the ripening and the growing and the harvesting. They've just harvested the fields in front of us and it's fabulous to look at."

In conversation with Catherine Foley

Patricia Scanlan's latest novel, Two For Joy, is published by Bantam Press, £12.99 in UK

When in Jordan...

. . . don't shave before swimming

in the Dead Sea. If you go in defolliculated the sea's high

mineral content - the Dead Sea

is essentially a salt lake - will

make it a spectacularly painful experience.

Rosita Boland