Don’t eat the puffin – and other travel advice

If I only had one piece of advice for you, after all these years of travel, it would simply be this – don’t eat the oily seabird, however drunk you are. They’ll tell you it’s just like pigeon. They’ll say it’s a speciality that you simply must try. They are wrong, so very wrong, on both counts.

I mean, I have got other travel tips, if you want them. Don’t play cards with a man on the street in Barcelona, however easy it looks to win. Don’t argue with an Italian waiter. Don’t do your laundry in a Portuguese guesthouse sink. None of these things have good outcomes.

But for sheer self-preservation, I’m going to suggest that – should you ever find yourself in Iceland, on the wrong end of many, many beers – do not eat the puffin. And definitely don’t follow it with a whale steak. You can thank me later.

I put this top tip in my first travel memoir, Takoradi to the Stars (via Huddersfield), but I think it’s so important that I’ve gone for a re-design and a re-brand.

So, I give you Don’t Eat the Puffin: Tales From a Travel Writer’s Life – a new cover and a new title for Takoradi to the Stars, but the same great travel tales, just now with added puffin.