Brief Encounters: Neck

She was a smiley English girl, with a handsome, surfer-blond French boyfriend. We boarded the train together at Colombo, and they hauled their surf boards onto the luggage rack, where they threatened to fall off and concuss someone all the way to Hikkaduwa. We were packed in as tightly as jigsaw pieces. Only sweatier.

We chatted excitedly about reaching Sri Lanka's south coast. But an hour or so later – hot, hungry, thirsty and facing backwards in my seat – I started to feel nauseous. So she lifted up my hair and blew on the back of my neck. It was such an unexpected, kind and intimate gesture from a stranger, and it worked: my queasiness disappeared a moment later. But I felt warm inside the rest of the way to Galle.

Brief Encounters: Vivek

His smart navy suit stood him apart from the other staff at Chennai airport – and conferred, I hoped, some authority – so I raced over to him. Vivek, his badge said, and he was barely over 22.
"How can you have left your passport on the plane?" he asked, smiling, after I breathlessly told him what I'd done. I didn't know myself - tiredness, preoccupation, hurrying to make my connecting flight to Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Vivek picked up his phone and spoke to someone, unhurriedly. It seemed an inconclusive conversation. "Can I look on the plane? It's just out there, I just landed," I said.
He shook his head. It took me a second to realise he was doing an Indian head wobble, which can mean yes, no, maybe, whatever...
"We will get your passport back, no problem," he smiled. "What seat were you in? Do you have ID?"
I handed him my credit card. It's a measure of how much, from experience, I trust Indian people - or perhaps how desperate I was - that I did this without hesitation. "Wait here," he ordered.
Five minutes later he was back, strolling calmly towards me clutching my green travel folder. I tried to play it cool, but I was so relieved I wanted to cry. I gushed my gratitude and sprinted from the terminal.

The Accidental Explorer

Rob Lilwall was teaching geography at a state school near Oxford when he decided to jack it in, take a one-way flight to the farthest reaches of Siberia and cycle back home to London on his mountain bike. No camera crew, sponsorship or book deal – just him, his Specialized Rockhopper, £8,000 life savings, an impressively flimsy tent and an adventurous spirit.

The obvious route would have been to cross Russia into eastern Europe and home. But part-way in, Lilwall decided to go via Australia. The detour doubled the length of his epic trip to three years and 30,000 miles.

He set out from Magadan, Russia, on a chilly September day in 2004 – accompanied on this first leg by his friend, Al Humphreys. “Everyone we met said, “Why have you come in September? In a month it will be winter,’” says Lilwall, 32. “They would warn us about wolves, bears, robbers, the biting cold: they all agreed we were going to die, they just couldn’t agree how.” Four days later, the snow arrived.

Temperatures reached -40 degrees. Lilwall’s water froze and his bike slipped and slid on the icy roads. His Royal Mail over-trousers – £10 from eBay – did little to keep out the chill. On the upside, frozen rivers were easy to cross and there weren’t any mosquitoes. “Cycling in winter fitted my plans, and it felt more epic,” he says. “But I was miserable – the coldest I’d ever been before was camping in Scotland.” But people offered them food and shelter, often several nights a week. “The more remote I was, the friendlier the people.”

After Siberia, he took a boat to Japan – “I was so happy to be alive” – then on to South Korea, China and Hong Kong. There, he waited three months for a passage to the Philippines with another Englishman, then picked his way down to Australia. It was there he nearly gave up. “I had malaria, I was homesick, exhausted, fed up and my money was running out,” he says. “But I thought, how would I feel if I went home early? That’s what kept me going.” That, and lecturing at schools about his trip to make ends meet.

In a world packed with professional adventurers, Lilwall cuts a charmingly innocent figure. He lacks the swagger and privilege of Bear Grylls, Ewan McGregor or Charley Boorman. He is slight, with a warm, sparky face and a cracking dead-pan wit.

He was ill-prepared for the trip. “I made up the route as I went along,” he says. “I didn’t know that part of the world, but I saw a string of islands from Japan to Australia so I thought it could be done.” He did no training, his kit was more suited to a festival than the world’s most hostile terrains, and he didn’t try to travel light, lugging War and Peace round Russia, never quite getting round to reading it.

Yet what he lacked in army-style preparation, you sense he made up for in personality, making friends easily and networking with aplomb. “I thought three months ahead – emailing anyone who might be able to help,” he says. His teaching must have given him confidence and a thick skin, and he seems relentlessly cheerful.

From Perth he took a freighter to Singapore, then cycled through Malaysia up to Vietnam, China again, and to Afghanistan via Tibet and Pakistan. By Turkmenistan, the mercury had hit +40 degrees, “easier than -40”.

Three friends joined him for the last leg through Europe. When he reached London, his new girlfriend Christine, whom he met in Hong Kong, was waiting for him. They married three months ago.

Then, a stroke of luck: a friend of Christine’s worked in publishing and suggested Lilwall send in a proposal. “Not feeling terribly confident, I did,” he says. It led to a book deal. Ten “emotionally consuming” months later it was finished, and published in September.

Lilwall filmed much of his trip, balancing his camera on a rock and cycling past cinematically, or trusting new-found friends with it. In one sequence, in Hanoi, he weaves elegantly through traffic to a stirring soundtrack: scruffy, serene, determined, a bit eccentric and unmistakably English. It’s very moving – one man and his bike against the world.

“Cycling Home From Siberia” is published by Hodder & Stoughton, price £12.99 (cyclinghomefromsiberia.com).

Queen of New York

Give me a celebrity red-carpet event or a copy of Grazia, and I will happily judge A-listers without pausing for breath. It’s so much fun: Meryl, sweetie, what are you wearing? Jen, Jen, he’s a waste of space. Brad, seriously – be a man. Who doesn’t love a good bitch?

Of course I’m an amateur. New Yorker Abe Gurko is a pro – he has turned razor-sharp social observation into an art-form. In his blog I Mean What?!? – peppered with OMGs and oys – he skewers celebrities, details fashion disasters and humiliates Republicans (his current obsessions are Sarah Palin’s erstwhile son-in-law-to-be, Levi Johnston, underwear-as-outerwear, and his dog, Woodstock).

His day job in events production and public relations in the fashion, design and entertainment industries throws him into regular contact with the celebrity classes – he is currently working with Carrie Fisher on her one-woman show, Wishful Drinking – but more importantly, gives his blog more ammunition.

Gurko and I met in Reykjavik (pictured) – smuggling pastries from our hotel’s breakfast room under the nose of the watchful maitre d’ and into the minibus waiting outside in the snow, tooting its horn. He was lively, conspiratorial company.

We were attending Iceland’s first design and fashion festival. Gurko works with one of the country’s best-known fashion designers, Steinunn Sigurdardottir, launching her clothing in the US a few years back. The trip was every bit as fabulous, wierd and beautiful as you’d expect. I met creative people, coveted expensive knitwear, swam in hot springs, ate a lot of fish and partied in downtown Reykjavik – a street away from uptown Reykjavik (it’s a small place).

Gurko blogs every morning. “I’m up early anyway,” he says, “so I put on a pot of coffee, read the news online and decide who’s really annoying me that day. It’s usually people who think they’re all that – there’s such an arrogance that comes with celebrity. I am a bitchy queen, but I’m political too. And I’m honest about what I say, even if it alienates people.”

He is wasted in print. In person, Gurko is like Carrie Bradshaw's acerbic, Jewish, gay best friend: no surprise, then, that he’s developing an online fashion news show. Oh, and auditioning to be the best friend of a celebrity on her reality show. A real-life version of a fictional character on a TV show may become a real-life fake character on a reality show... Only in New York.

On Beauty

I’ve never had lunch with a supermodel before, but if I’d ever given it a moment’s thought (ok, I admit I did, back in school), Helena Christensen would be top of my list. To my teenage self, she seemed the most intelligent, interesting and likeable one. I tried to copy her sexy-hippy look. I remember her tiny Copenhagen apartment photographed for British Vogue – an elegant hall table scattered with Polaroids from ‘her latest shoot’; a small, faded painting of an old Chinese lady; pots and pans suspended over a kitchen hob. One day, I told myself, I’m going have that life. I’m still working on it.

I met her yesterday at Shoreditch House: she is starring in a new campaign to make Habitat come across as warmer, friendlier and cosier. Why approach a supermodel, you might ask. But Christensen, with Danish ‘hygge’ oozing from every pore, seems a good fit (see Oliver Burkeman’s article on hygge).

She is, of course, beautiful – in a natural, non-freakish way. She is slim, not skinny. She had messy shoulder-length hair, grey painted nails, smudgy black eyeliner, and wore a short, slouchy black jersey dress and black patterned tights. She had a mid-Atlantic/Euro accent. She ate a hearty lunch, knocking back wine and dessert.

She is obsessed with vintage Danish design, and rips pages from interiors magazines: “I board planes with piles of them, ripping away. When I look through them again, months later, I often can’t remember why I tore a page out,” she says. “So I study it until I find the one small thing that made me keep it.” She is chatty, polite, funny, curious, open, intelligent, and cracked constant jokes with the half-dozen people there – the fact we weren't interviewing her no doubt made her more relaxed. She would be a great dinner party guest.

I realise none of this is extraordinary or, to many, interesting. Yet different rules seem to apply to the famous and the beautiful: don't we feel a thrill when we discover that someone like Christensen is, in fact, normal and nice – as if that alone is an achievement? For the rest of us, this is surely the minimum requirement, after which we usually have to do something.

But she does has an interesting, enviable life. She has just returned from Peru – she is half-Peruvian and speaks Spanish – where she was photographing evidence of climate change for an exhibition heading, via the UN Headquarters in New York, for Copenhagen in December. She was off to Paris after lunch, on Eurostar. She lives in New York, summers at her Danish beach house, raises her son.

Beauty, along with material wealth, is proven not to make us happy. My favourite positive psychologist (I know how that makes me sound), Sonia Lyubomirsky, says: “We simply don’t focus on our appearance when thinking about how happy we are. Good-looking people aren’t any happier. Becoming objectively more beautiful will not make most of you happier. Coming to believe you are beautiful is another story, and research suggests that this may be one of many happiness boosters.”

That is another story. But beauty has given Christensen the means to live a fabulous, glamorous and – apparently – happy life, so perhaps Lyubomirsky is wrong.

Christensen still has her tiny apartment in Copenhagen – in cobbled Christianshavn, round the corner from my brother-in-law. It says H Christensen on the front – in Denmark, by law, you must put your name on your door.

She hugged – or should that be hygged – me tight when I left: a proper squeeze, not an air-kiss. My teenage pronouncement turned out to be right, after all.

"I simply fell in love with that glorious food"

I hadn't heard of Julia Child before I visited the US last month. Now, after a series of Julia-related incidences and coincidences, I feel I know this remarkable woman well.

First, I saw Julie & Julia. Next, while visiting the Smithsonian in Washington with my friend Ellen (we spent most of the time in the shop), I stumbled on Child's kitchen, which she donated to the museum in 2001. Then I found myself on Olive Avenue, a street in Georgetown, DC, lined with cute clapboard house where – I later discovered – Child used to live.

But best of all, I read her memoir, My Life In France, and discovered a spirited, curious, no-nonsense, sexual, determined woman: extremely tall, extremely loud and very, very funny.

Child was America's more fabulous answer to Elizabeth David. She bought French cooking to Americans – then just discovering the delights of meals-on-a-plate – in the form of her best-selling 1961 book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She went on to host, exuberantly, several series of cookery programmes. She died in 2004, two days before her 92nd birthday.

Her husband, Paul Child, was posted to France in 1948, and Julia fell instantly in love with the country, its people and, most of all, its food. She found everything "terribly exciting" in a Joyce Grenfell, hockey-sticks sort of way, and was unfazed and amused by most things life threw at her.

She started lessons at Cordon Bleu – and found her calling. She spent hours at home, experimenting. On mastering mayonnaise she wrote: "I thought it was utterly fascinating. By the end of my research, I believe, I had written more on the subject of mayonnaise than anyone in history. I made so much mayonnaise that Paul and I could hardly bear to eat it anymore, and I took to dumping my test batches down the toilet." She sent her tried-and-tested recipe to friends in the US. "All I received in response was a yawning silence. Hm! I was miffed, but not deterred. Onward I plunged," she wrote.

Above all, I loved Julia and Paul's relationship. They had enormous fun together. Everything and everyone had a nickname: their apartment on 81 Rue de l'Universite in Paris was christened 'Roo de Loo'. Their Buick station wagon was 'The Blue Flash' – mutating into a verb ("We Flashed into Rouen..."). They posed for silly photos on Valentine's Day (see below, in 1956). They were deeply in love, an apparent meeting of souls.

They met while working for the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, during the Second World War, first in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), then China. He was 42, cultured, a "natty dresser" and dated lots of women. She was 32, inexperienced but game. They discovered a shared love of trying exotic food. "I was lucky to marry Paul," she wrote. "I hated being without my husband. Paul and I liked to travel at the same slow pace. He always knew so much about things, discovered hidden wonders, noticed ancient walls or indigenous smells, and I missed his warm presence. Once upon a time I had been content as a single woman, but now I couldn't stand it!"

It has been written that meeting Paul was the point in her life when Julia was found. "I was a late bloomer who was still growing up. I didn't get started on life until I was about thirty-two, which was good because I was old enough to appreciate it. I had it all ahead of me."

Photograph (top) by Arnold Newman, 1970.

Blood On The Tracks

A freshly retired crime correspondent might be happy to hang up his mac and never darken the Old Bailey again. Not Duncan Campbell. “I get terrible withdrawals,” he says when he reads about cases such as the recent £40m jewellery robbery in Mayfair. “It was exciting, fascinating, another world. There was never a dull moment.”

He has an expert's eye: the Mayfair robbers, for example, enlisted a make-up artist from a salon in Covent Garden to alter their appearances. “That was a mistake,” he says, knowingly. “The inside man is always the weak link. They’re the ones that crack”.

But he also has a writer’s feel for crime’s black, often comical, turn of events. “There was the 1991 tale of the Suffolk barrister’s wife and her flying instructor lover who plotted to kill her husband by luring him naked into the living room and drowning him in the duck pond in a fake lawnmower accident. Whatever happened to them?”

Campbell, a law graduate, covered some of Britain’s biggest cases: James Bulger, Stephen Lawrence, Rosemary West. But he doesn’t fit the profile of a hard-bitten hack: he’s a self-confessed hippy, former commune-dweller, world traveller and culture fan – when we meet, he’s just back from a week at the Edinburgh Festival.

In this latter respect he’s no different, he says, from many criminals. “The crowd I got to know best were bright armed robbers who’d got degrees in prison. On the outside they were all ‘fucking this, fucking that’. But they were extremely well-read. One told me he was reading Virginia Woolf’s ‘To The Lighthouse’. When I mentioned this to another robber, he sucked his teeth: ‘It’s not her best.’

“The police were the same, listening to Bob Dylan, quoting Harold Pinter. You couldn’t put them in a novel, they’d be too florid. It was a great lesson in never to assume anything about anybody.”

Campbell’s first big case was the Torso Murder in 1977, which he covered for Time Out: back then it had a radical news section. The wrong people were convicted – Bob Maynard and Reg Dudley, victims of a witness who later admitted to Campbell he’d made up his evidence. They were eventually cleared but only after 20 years in jail. It was Campbell’s first proper brush with wrongful imprisonment, a cause he has a championed ever since.

He joined the Guardian in 1987, aged 42, after a couple of tries. His most memorable trial was Rose West – convicted in 1995 of 10 charges of murder of young women and girls. “What struck me most was how all that horror had taken place in such a small space,” he says of Cromwell Street. Reporting on the trial was like covering the end of a more innocent time, he says, and it marked a sea change in how seriously crimes against women were taken.

He stood in the dock himself in 1997, when the police sued the Guardian for libel over an article Campbell had written about police corruption. “I didn’t sleep the night before,” he says. Against the odds, the paper won. “We had a smart jury. But it made me more cautious about everything I wrote after that.” Operation Jackpot subsequently became one of the biggest inquiries into police corruption.

Seeking a change, Campbell headed to Los Angeles as the paper’s correspondent. “Someone once said LA is a a great place to live, but you wouldn’t want to visit. I agree – it has many layers, but you have to unpeel them slowly.” The job took him far afield: Colombia, Chile, Mexico, even Sydney.

Unlike many young thrusters, Campbell was 26 – almost certainly a ripe age in 1971 – when he realised he wanted to be a journalist. So he took himself, his long hair and his bell-bottoms off to India in search of adventure and stuff to write about.

He kept a journal from that long trip, which also took him east to Laos, Thailand, Singapore and Hong Kong. “I’m glad I did: you think you’ll remember things, but you don’t.” He discovered it when he came to write his debut novel, 2008’s thriller The Paradise Trail, set in a traveller’s hostel in Calcutta in 1971. It’s full of delicious period details: the books (Siddhartha), the music (Velvet Underground) and the late-night discussions over a smoke (how to change the world and what Bob Dylan lyrics really mean). “I loved writing it.”

His second novel, If It Bleeds, is a thriller about a British crime correspondent on a national newspaper (the title refers to the news editor’s axiom ‘If it bleeds, it leads’). “It’s a strange world, writing fiction. You end up giving away a bit of yourself,” he says.

“You were a bit of a hippy back then,” said Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger at Campbell’s leaving party a few months ago. “Still am,” said Campbell proudly. Hippy ideals, crime writing and campaigning against injustice, it seems, do go hand in hand after all.

If It Bleeds and The Paradise Trail are published by Headline.

Photograph: Beth Evans (bethevans.com)