From The Sunday Times

July 6, 2008

My hols: Robbie Coltrane

Coal fires on the beach, kirsch in the kids’ food, hotel-size waves: Robbie Coltrane loves it all

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/news/article4268182.ece

A My Hols celebrity travel special

WHEN I was a child, people didn’t go abroad, they would just holiday on the British coast.

Only the toffs left the country in the 1950s. They’d go to the south of France and hobnob with Graham Greene, while the rest of us went to Fort William and had to put up with the cold weather.

My father actually used to take coal to the beach and start a fire in the sand. He’d get a lovely blaze going.

It’s not about being warm on the beach; if you want to be warm, you can sit in front of the fire at home. I completely understand those people who sit in the freezing cold in a deckchair and put a windbreak round themselves. What I don’t understand is why people want to be on the beach abroad, getting slowly roasted with 50,000 other people. That’s a complete waste of time.

It’s different when you have children – the kids love playing on the beach, but then it’s not about being on the beach, it’s about being with your kids. When your children are happy, that’s as happy as you’re ever going to be.

I took Spencer and Alice to New York on the QE2 in January, and that was fantastic. It’s a real journey – certainly not cruising! Oh no, cruising is all about umbrellas in your drinks and getting off at St Thomas for five minutes and buying yet another Prada handbag. I hate all that. Frankly, I think all cruisers should be sunk. No, aboard the QE2, you’re on a journey.

We went from Southampton to New York nonstop: it should have taken only three days but ended up taking six, as we had to accompany the Queen Victoria, a big tub of a ship that looked like it was made out of Lego.

During the trip, we had two days of really, really bad storms, but secretly I was hoping for that. There were huge waves the size of hotels, a mile long – just absolutely savage. And at one point you’re 1,000 miles from the nearest land. I loved every minute of it.

They had a 1940s menu, so my children were introduced to all sorts of food they’d never tasted before, such as quail’s-egg dauphinoise and chilled fruit surprise, which was just a bowl of fruit soup with ice surrounding it, like how you would serve caviar or seafood.

My boy Spencer got right into it, saying, “This is delicious, Dad. Want to try some?” It wasn’t until I bought the recipe book on the way off the ship that I realised it had two measures of kirsch mixed in – no wonder he liked it so much.

On the QE2, you come into New York under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, up the North River,with the morning light coming up over Manhattanand, Jesus Christ, it’s beautiful. But you also seeEllis Island and the Statue of Liberty and thinkabout all the millions and millions of people whomade that journey to get away from political oppression – it was a very moving moment.

I don’t usually get much chance to go on holiday, but I do travel a lot with work. I did a film called Brothers Bloom last year in Montenegro, and I’d never been there before.

It was in the south of the old Yugoslavia, just north of Greece. It’s such a beautiful place, and it really is “monte negro” – it has these great big black basalt mountains, with tiny little white churches tucked into crevices – from a distance they look just like edelweiss. It’s gorgeous, and the people are awfully friendly.

At the hotel I was staying in, they would come round at dinner with a huge tray covered in the fish they had caught that day and would desperately try to translate what everything was.

They were really sweet – you could tell they were upset when we all left. My one big passion is cars – a trip I’d love to do is the vintage-car race from Beijing to Paris, but it’s all done by humungously rich people, who take a spare car and three mechanics with them.

I think it’s kind of self-indulgent to spend that amount of money and use that much gas on something that is totally unnecessary. I think my conscience would take over. All these cars that cost two-million quid driving through countries where they live on a dollar a week just seems a wee bit like cultural imperialism of the worst sort. Fun, but a bit too decadent for me.

Robbie Coltrane talked to Sian Thatcher