Bed post

An interesting job this one...

Western wonder

VIP Valencia

This is the view from Vertical, a restaurant inhabiting the 13th floor of the Confortel hotel. It has a Michelin star and overlooks Calatrava's City of Arts and Sciences from the east. It was one of a number of exclusive places that I put in a high-end city guide for luxury mobile phone company Vertu. Aimed at the business traveller who wears off the peg Prada on tour, listens to Genesis on a Bang & Olufsen and has a wine celler bigger than my flat, it was an insider's guide to the glitzy overbelly of my adoptive city. Before you laugh, yes, I have inside knowledge of these places. Okay, that might be through speaking to the chef de rang via email or looking through the online gallery for descriptive prompts but you didn't honestly think that I got to go to all the places I mention, did you?

Malaga revisited (and re-edited)

With the blossom-perfumed, finger-clicking, champers-popping trio of Seville, Granada and Marbella just a few miles away, it’s no wonder Malaga has been treated like the dowdy stepsister all these years. Admittedly, the city lacks the picture-box beauty of Seville, Granada's Alhambra and the millionaire magnetism of Marbella, but these things don't make the perfect holiday, they just give you a few things to tick off, don't they? Plaza de España? Check. Flamenco show? Check. Sean Connery and wife? Check. We go to these places to see things we've seen in pictures or heard about from people who've been there. We go there to say we've been there. Not wanting to get all Alain de Botton on you, but what happened to discovery? Sure, you might have an epiphany sitting in a well-recommended tablao or shuffling around the "must sees" with everyone else, but you won't see anything different to what every other punter who's just hopped on a plane with a guide book sees, will you? Go to a part of the world like the Costa de Sol that gets more slagging off in polite conversation than Robert Mugabe, however, and you'll feel like you're on a voyage of discovery. I mean, grilled sardines on the beach, tapas for under €4 a pop and one of the best botanical gardens in Europe - for me it was more like a voyage into paradise. So I tried to convey my enthusiasm for the place in a five-page city guide for the Ryanair Magazine after a brief visit (with this photographer: www.niccologuasti.com), and explain that Malaga's charm lies in all the things that make it different from it's neighbours. But I fear that some of my honest talk of a much-maligned, diamond-in-the-rough, city-on-the-up might have been tamed to make it sound a bit more glowing. Ah well, worth a try. (www.ryanairmag.com)