Celebrities, it went on, such as Margaret Drabble, Phil Tufnell and Vanessa Feltz were among their satisfied customers. If I wanted the names of other famous people who had been on their courses, I should check out their website.Wow, what a brilliant way of finding out whether a holiday will be any good. Wild horses wouldn’t stop me from signing on for a seven-day course in life skills on Kos or Patmos or wherever it is, if it turns out that Edwina Currie did the same thing last summer. “The plaster I put on this morning to cover my athlete’s foot has just fallen off.”What has prompted my present interest in activity holidays was a flyer that came through the door earlier this week advertising one-week activity holidays on a Greek island featuring such courses as ceramics, yoga, life skills and personal development for £199 including air fare, hotel and full board. The man beside me was an American wine writer, the sort of buff who can tell you everything about a wine’s provenance merely by sniffing it.”I hope all this exertion is going to produce some amazing port,” I remarked casually as we goose-stepped through the squelchy purple mush “It ought to,” he replied. Everything was going fine until the bit where we had to tread the grapes in a huge stone trough the size of a swimming pool, marching up and down with our arms linked while a merry band of minstrels on the side played typical grape-treading folk music. Tourists learning about port would, our host thought, be a far more lucrative line of business than producing the stuff for commercial purposes, though naturally he had to keep it ticking over as a cosmetic exercise.

It was possibly my excursion to the Douro that put me off activity holidays for ever, though it was not officially billed as such.It was a press trip organised by the enterprising young owner of a famous Portuguese quinta, whose family had been producing port wine for nine generations but was now sadly losing out to more popular post-prandial digestifs such as Bailey’s Irish Cream. Kate had bought a ruined but ‘n’ ben in Sutherland, on to which she planned to put a turf roof and in to which she was strongly inclined to install an earth closet instead of a lavatory.”Well, how was it?” I asked when she returned from Scotland looking windswept Ghastly, she said. It had rained incessantly for 14 days, the midges had driven her mad and on the fourth night she went down with shellfish poisoning.She has since traded in her ruined croft in Sutherland for a ruined farmhouse with orange groves in southern Spain. When it is finished, she says, she plans to run her own activity holidays featuring, among other things, Andalucian cookery, wild flower drawing and creative writing.She is a good friend and always asks me to go with her but, as I explained, Antarctica leaves me cold, I have already done the port thing in the Douro, and we spend every summer in our own equivalent of a black house on a Scottish island.

Lounging on a deck chair beside a hotel swimming pool in Marrakesh, drinking margaritas and reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, as I did last year, is no longer socially acceptable, advised my friend Kate, who knows about these things.
Kate’s last three holidays have taken her to the South Atlantic to observe migrating whales and mating penguins, to the Douro to learn about the making, storing and appreciation of vintage port, and to a black house in the Western Isles, where she was supposed to be learning about traditional Scottish architecture. If I can summon up the energy – this time of year following the Christmas crescendo always finds me at my lowest ebb – I shall drop into my local travel agent this afternoon and pick up some brochures about activity holidays Everyone, apparently, is taking them. As officials in Paris point out, these measures simply reflect the reality we face in an increasingly dangerous world.k.sengupta independent.co.uk. Tony Blair’s decision to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with George Bush means that British citizens, along with Americans, are prize terrorist targets. Only very good intelligence, and some lucky breaks, has prevented a major atrocity over here.France has had its share of Islamist attacks in the past. But, with its opposition to the Iraq invasion, it is not so much in the firing line at present.

Yet long before Washington’s request for sky marshals, armed French special agents had been flying undercover on a number of flights to the US.France has also agreed to supply US officials with passenger manifest lists of any flights that warrant scrutiny at least an hour before take-off, rather than while the plane is in the air, as is the common practice, so that vetting of passengers can take place before they board. The ever-supine British, it is said, are ready to give in to this paranoia, readily acquiescing to demands for armed sky marshals. It is left to plucky Denmark and Sweden to resist Washington’s demands for guns on airliners.This view, however, is highly simplistic. In the current security climate, over-reaction is preferable to under-reaction The stakes are too high. The IRA message to Margaret Thatcher after the Brighton bombing – “You have got to be lucky all the time, we have got to be lucky just once” – has never been so relevant, even if the threat comes from another quarter.As the Hutton inquiry showed so clearly, there are differences within the intelligence community on how espionage information is interpreted.

The sole function of a highly paid CIA threat analyst, goes the quip, “is to look at al-Qa’ida and say they are a threat”.But the current threat was not dreamt up. Over the last month, intelligence agencies in the West, the Arab world and Asia have been picking up talk of an attack. The snippets have come from telephone intercepts by GCHQ in Britain, the National Security Agency in the US and other listening posts, as well as human intelligence. Such “chatter” preceded the bombings in Turkey, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and Bali, and indeed 11 September itself. Although the terrorist groups are becoming increasingly proficient at anti-surveillance techniques, a major operation involves a certain amount of seepage.Pieced together, the jigsaw of information from various countries indicated a desire for an attack using aircraft – and, according to the Americans, flights to Los Angeles, Washington and New York are particularly targeted. But the warnings have not been just about possible hijackings.