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It is the first Sunday in April, 2009, and my train has chuntered out of Brussels, bound for East Flanders. Ghent, famed for its immaculately-preserved medieval architecture, is less than an hour to the north, but my destination is the lesser-known hilly area to the south of the region - the Flemish Ardennes - home to the "hellingen" which provide the dramatic setting for the cobbled classic cycle races run in Flanders each Spring.

In professional cycling, cobbles are to these "Classics" what the high mountain passes of the Pyrenees and the Alps are to the Tour de France. It is on these sections of the course that the ambitions of the few are realised, the hopes of many are crushed and, in such short, steep climbs as the famous Koppenberg, near the town of Oudenaarde, that thousands fervently line the route to experience the thrill of the race as it hurtles past.

Where the colour, celebrity and scale of the Tour de France lend it a glorious, epic glamour, the grittiness of the so-called "northern" Classics has a fascination all of its own. The Paris-Roubaix race - run over an unrelenting series of punishing cobbled farm tracks in northern France - is considered the "Queen of the Classics", but is preceded in late March and early April each year by the Vlaamse Wielerweek (Flemish cycling week).

This festival of racing includes the Classic Ghent-Wevelgem, which features the ascent and terrifying descent of the famous Kemmelberg climb, and the "Three Days of De Panne" stage race in West Flanders. But the highlight, and the race which brings all of Flanders to a standstill, is the Ronde van Vlaanderen (Tour of Flanders).

"You can either ride the cobbles or you can't", says Barry Hoban, an Englishman whose successes in the 1960s and 70s endeared him to Flandrians to such an extent that he became known as The Gent of Ghent. "Some guys are terrified of them. You have to ride them hard and fast and take whatever the weather throws at you. I've ridden Paris-Roubaix in snowstorms and I've ridden it in a heatwave. And when it's hot and dry it's worse because the dust gets up and your eyes are red for about three days afterwards."

As someone who "hit the north" as an outsider, Hoban - whose results included victory in Gent-Wevelgem, third in Paris-Roubaix and fifth in the Ronde - is well-placed to comment on what distinguishes the culture of cycling there. "As a young man, I left West Yorkshire - a hard-grafting, coal-mining area - and moved to northern France and lived among hard-grafting, coal-mining people there," recalls the 71-year-old.

"The only difference was the language and the fact that they loved cycling, because the people were exactly the same. I lived first in Bethune (in France) and later in Ghent, and at that time there were very few English-speaking riders. But I didn't feel out of place. I learned French and Flemish and just immersed myself in it. People took me to their hearts as one of their own."

Hoban describes his Ghent-Wevelgem win in 1974 as being as special as his Tour de France stage wins. "In that race I beat everyone, all of the guys from that great generation of Belgian cyclists: Eddy Merckx was second, Roger de Vlaeminck was third. [Walter] Godefroot, Freddy Maertens were both there. I beat them all, I beat the hierarchy of Belgium. It was good."

He also remembers losing out against Merckx, probably the greatest cyclist of all time, when they hit the "muur" together in the 1969 Ronde. Muur means "wall" in Dutch, and the Muur van Geraardsbergen, with its half-kilometre cobbled section, scaling upwards at a gradient of up to 20% to the iconic Chapel of Our Lady at its summit, often proves the decisive battleground at the head of the race. The latter half of the Ronde features more than a dozen similar hellingen, but because the Muur comes after 250km of racing - only 17km from the finish in Ninove - those not reaching the chapel with the leaders have no chance of contesting the win.

My train into Geraardsbergen - one of the oldest "cities" in Europe, but now a modestly-sized municipality - is not busy. Few, it seems, travel from metropolitan, cosmopolitan Brussels to watch this race. But as I reach the main street leading up to the town square, I realise the party is already in full swing. It is a bright, sunny day, warm for April, and old and young mingle together in the square's packed bars and restaurants.

The race passes through the square and it is just before it that the Muur begins in earnest, albeit the cobbled section isn't for another half kilometre. Past the square the road swings upwards and left, and several thousand fans are packed in along the wide boulevard.

The riders are still more than 40 minutes away, but already a decisive break has formed. The biggest name in Belgian cycling, and two-time winner of the race, Tom Boonen, has missed it, but last year's winner, the Flandrian Stijn Devolder, is present. There are black and yellow Lion of Flanders flags everywhere.

I head further on up the hill. At the end of Oudebergstraate a cobbled lane narrows and steepens, making its way up through a wooded section and round a hairpin bend which kicks up again to the Chapel at the top. This is the heart of the Muur, where the toughest riders create the fractional gaps that can quickly lengthen into decisive ten or 20 second leads. All the way up, on both sides of the road, people are tucked into the embankment, holding on to the branches of trees to stop themselves falling on to the road. Some have been there for hours, waiting like snipers for a Boonen, Devolder or Lief Hoste to pass by inches in front of them. Waiting, I discover, to unleash their noise on the Ronde.

Among the crowd the orange of visiting Dutch fans is visible; a few English voices can be heard; and a fan club of Italians is vocalising its support for the young up-and-coming Italian rider Marco Bandiera. But though the appeal of the race is international, its identity is distinctly Flandrian: the majority of the spectators are behind the local riders and chants of "Sti -jn - Devolder" ring out.

"When you're a kid and you take up cycling you dream of making it to the Muur van Geraardsbergen in first place," is how Boonen, a native Flandrian, explains the passion and frenzy. "Belgians grow up with cycling in their hearts. It's ingrained in our culture like football in Italy or skiing in Austria. [The Ronde] has always been part of my life, ever since I was a kid and would watch the race on television. It's my country's race and it's where I had my first great victory in a Classic [in 2005]. It was an unforgettable moment. When I crossed the finish line in front of thousands of supporters screaming my name it was like living a dream."

As I squeeze into a spot just below the chapel, the scene is a flurry of nervous activity. Some have radios pressed to their ears and I catch the names Devolder, Boonen, Gilbert and Chavanel at various intervals. A man, fuelled by strong beer and sensing a captive audience, decides to break the tension by performing a dance with his trousers at his ankles, much to the delight of his peers.

And then the television helicopter is sighted overhead. A new expectation fills the air: the race is near, the distant roar of crowds further down the road can be heard, and as the volume increases men, women, children, even dogs strain their eyes on the road. People know Devolder and the Frenchman Chavanel are up there, and they know that Boonen hasn't made it. A flash of colour is sighted through a chicane in the road, and the crowd slowly recognises it is one rider on his own. It is Devolder.

An ecstasy fills the air. Men roar and women shriek as he rounds the bend at the top of the Muur in a flash, sweat glistening over his muscles in the sunlight, a grimace of pain etched on his face. And his effort is not in vain: he crests the summit with a gap of some ten seconds on his pursuers and by the time he reaches Ninove it is almost a minute.

I eventually make my way back to the square, where a full-scale celebration is underway. Assuming it to be a Flandrian beer, I order an Orval, and am chided for it by a local man, who explains to me that it is, in fact, from the French-speaking Walloonian south. And maybe he is right to chide: maybe the passion and parochiality of Vlaamse Wielerweek is what gives it its distinctiveness, its enduring appeal in a world in which sport is becoming ever-more globalised and commercialised. "It's poetry and war at the same time," Boonen tells me. "This sport is like religion to us."

This article appeared in the magazine Metropolitan

IT was a beautiful morning in Dingwall yesterday, the kind of morning that sends city dwellers scarpering up mountains and the like in pursuit of solitude and unspoilt vistas.

And after about 9am it will have been quiet, too - quieter probably than at any time, not counting Sabbath days, for many a year. The Scottish Cup final kicked off in Glasgow at 3pm, but an exodus of military efficacy had been put in train on Friday with a bag-piped send-off for the players of Ross County that would have done the region's martial ancestors proud.

Their mission ultimately failed, but few from the Ross-shire town were ever likely to miss the occasion for all the Highland sunshine of a dozen summers. It is no exaggeration to suggest that almost an entire community made for Hampden Park yesterday: the population of Dingwall is about 5000, but more than 18,000 "Staggies" - young and old, very young and not-so-very old - found their way to the south side of Glasgow.

In Dundee United, First Division County were up against a team who, by dint of not being one of the Old Firm pair, would ordinarily be underdogs themselves at a cup final. As I mixed with the County fans, I was reminded of that great novel about Scottish football by Robin Jenkins, The Thistle and the Grail, in which a small-town Lanarkshire club makes it to Hampden, uniting rich and poor, friend and foe along the way. But this was the fairytale romance of the cup made real and updated for the 21st century - Ross County diehards are as likely to be women as they are men with war-wounds and bad chests from smoking roll-ups.

There was a buzz in Dingwall - a buzz eagerly stoked and taken measure of by local and national media - that built to a crescendo all last week but which began the moment County knocked Celtic out of the tournament in last month's semi-finals.

The May 6 general election and its aftermath didn't get a look in: the town had special pies and cakes to bake, shop windows to dress, processions to organise. There was also a record out, a version of a Proclaimers song by a local band called Torridon. It was a missed opportunity for someone to form a duo called Ross and Cromarty - you know, like Flanders and Swann - and shut the Reid twins up for good.

Cakes and pies are thrust in front of television cameras whenever a provincial club achieves any degree of success in the cup, but there's nothing stage-managed or fake about Ross County. "It's a community club, a family club, all the way," according to Lynn Lonnen, a supporter I met on Friday night in the Mallard, a pub on the very platform of Dingwall Railway Station. "We're a small town, people know one another, we don't lock our doors. You see the chairman about town, or the players, and they'll speak to you."

County, in other words, are a nice football club, the antithesis of, say, 
Millwall. They can't not be nice even when they try: one of the songs in the fans' repertoire makes it clear to opponents that they will be left "crying in their mammy's soup".

They even have an amicable relationship with their local rivals Inverness Caley Thistle who yesterday hung out a banner emblazoned with the words "ICT wishes Ross County all the best". "There's very occasionally fisticuffs with some of the younger supporters, but usually it's because of the drink," Arnie, Lynn's husband, told me.

He also told me County play "probably the best football in Scotland", and it's true that in 2007 they did - despite topping Division Two at the time - get rid of Dick Campbell as manager because the football his team were playing was insufficiently attractive.

Sadly, yesterday they had an off-day in a game that never really sparked to life as a contest. Maybe the supporters were too nice about their team's failings - certainly there was no impatient chorus of "pish" from the West Stand whenever a pass was misplaced, as there might have been had any of the not-quite-so-nice clubs been playing.

It was for the "buzz" and the much-vaunted Highland hospitality - the drink, essentially - that I was in 
Dingwall. Unfortunately the drinkers seemed to have been headed in the other direction as I journeyed north.

I know this because I saw what a Friday night out in Glasgow had done to them as I made my way to the National Stadium before kick-off. Our insane laws against drinking on supporters' buses meant, however, that there was no-one making a proper fool of himself to laugh at on the road down.

But I am pleased to report that the consensus in the aftermath of defeat was that the party simply had to go on. Ross County's manager, Derek Adams, and their director of football, his father George, are tee-total for religious reasons and the local Wee Frees had decreed that an open-top bus parade in the event of victory wasn't to go ahead until Monday (this in an area of the country that elects Charles Kennedy as its MP), but celebrations planned for last night were not being cancelled.

One woman from Dingwall told me before the game that if County won, "the town won't sleep for a week". Afterwards, a man confided he was merely planning on "a wee dram." Katie MacKenzie and Jilly Murray, were unwavering in their intentions, however: "We're staying 
out in Glasgow tonight, without a doubt", said Katie with a purposeful ­expression that sadly I hadn't the chance to ­misinterpret as an invitation.

"We lost, but you keep your chin up," added Jilly. "I'd say the big thing really was coming down and beating Celtic in the last round." And with that, they were off into the dusk, "family final" done and dusted and mammy's soup not even on the menu.

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald

Five letters, starting with a big old O, proclaim Chicago's most exalted living scion. The very name warms hearts from pole to melting pole, kindles faith in improvement and leaves millions of Americans moist about their peepers.

Saviour of the world though he may be, we're not talking about President Obama here. No no. Chicago is Oprah's town. Somewhere along the line she wrestled Al Capone's heirs off the throne, and nowadays she gets to do what she wants, with Mayor Richard M Daley's blessing: on our visit half of Michigan Avenue, one of the city's main arteries, was closed off for two days while Oprah partied with her celebrity friends to mark the start of her 24th "season" on television. Most of the locals, shuddering to think what she has planned for her 25th, went about their business; some lapped it up, happy to hold aloft polystyrene clappy hands, ogle the slebs and stuff their faces.

Oprah, queen of empathy and psychobabble, "made it" in Chicago. The city, we are told, "made" Obama. There is, I'm sure of it, something about the place that revels in the containment of such dual narratives: tabloid talk host and self-help wet nurse on the one hand, cerebral politician and civil rights attorney on the other. Indeed, the president may have drawn up his ideological map living and working in Chicago's South Side, a place steeped in social activism and blue collar pride, but where would his campaign have been without its populism, its implacable showbiz optimism and the saccharine "yes we can"? Oprah's endorsement of Obama, incidentally, is estimated to have delivered him over a million votes.

There isn't, as yet, an official Obama-lover's tour of Chicago, although guides will point out the president's mock-Georgian mansion (surrounded by Secret Service goons), the church he used to attend before his pastor said unhelpful things about whites and the basketball court on which he won permission to date Michelle after impressing her brother with his dribbling. Much more visible around town is the insignia of Mayor Daley, who famously responded to Chicago topping the US murder league table in 2001 by insisting that the 9/11 deaths should have been included in New York's figures.

Given the historic scourges of gangsterism and corruption in Chicago, you can just about follow the PR logic. But Daley, whose father - also mayor - died in office in 1976 having served just a bit longer than the current incumbent's two decades, has never been entirely free from the suspicion of corruption himself, a suspicion that is wont to linger around most political dynasties but particularly around those in cities where politics, big business and the unions have always been close.

The upside of such fellowship is, perhaps, that, in Chicago, things get done: buildings go up, people get paid, the streets are clean and civic-mindedness thrives. The city's parks cover a total of 30 km²; one of them, Grant Park, hosts an excellent free Jazz Festival every year; and the Art Institute of Chicago houses some of the finest collections - European, American, Asian - anywhere in the world. The vibrancy and positivity that helps young Senators into the White House is not, indeed, hard to seek: it is there in the built environment, in the sports-mad citizenry whose baseball team never wins and in the nightlife that, according to Sinatra, not even Billy Sunday could shackle.

Chicago is, absolutely, the prototype of the modern metropolis. Razed to the ground by fire in 1871, it was rebuilt, skywards, round about the same time that it found itself at the intersection of the railroads from California to the North Atlantic and a shipping route that connected the cities of the north to New Orleans in the south. In 1900 the city's engineers reversed the flow of the Chicago River, a feat that made the Mississippi navigable from Lake Michigan. And so a town built on swampland became a major industrial player, not least - courtesy of the Refrigerated Railcart - as the nation's meatpacking hub. Yes we can, indeed.

Today, the vertical building styles of the last century and a half collide and caress on Chicago's street grid, a checkerboard designed by Daniel Burnham, the great American architect and urban planner who tried to put his vision of "the city beautiful" into practice in The Plan of Chicago. The neo-classical and the neo-Gothic are everywhere at street level; stretch your neck and you'll find elegant art deco skyscrapers, among the oldest in the world, and the bombastic modernist creations, all steel and glass, of Mies van der Rohe and his acolytes. Van der Rohe wanted to strip architecture of all historical peculiarities, but his buildings have a theatricality about them in-keeping with the majesty of the 20th Century American cityscape, which is to say a skyline suggestive of endless possibilities rather than of social engineering.

Chicago's buildings are also more visionary than those of New York, the city to which Chicagoans most frequently compare their own and occasionally find it wanting. In reality, there is little reason for them to feel in any way second best: Chicago doesn't share Manhattan's anger or its snobbery, it's cleaner and less frantic, and just about everything that's world-class in New York is at least as good in Chicago. Its theatre audiences can stomach more than just musicals, it gave the blues a home and invented house music and it sits right bang on a freshwater lake that's bigger than Wales.

The city that reversed a river also gave the world McDonald's, Playboy, rollerskates and Wrigley's, and, courtesy of the Chicago School of Economics, the free-market ideology some reckon brought last year's crash. Were he alive Milton Friedman might have stuck up for himself by pointing the finger at those who encouraged banks to make credit so easily available, ie governments. But as laissez-faire capitalists and Democratic Party machine politicians alike know, it'll take more than the laws of boom and bust to bring Chicago down.

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald magazine

IT'S all starting to go in one ear and out the other. Not the whisky, mind, which is going down the right place rather well, but the stuff Russell Anderson, distillery manager at Highland Park in Orkney, is telling us about it. The ears aren't all that important in the tasting of good whisky; alas, the nose most certainly is, and my nostrils are about as functioning and sensitive as a sniffer dog's, provided he's just come through a bad accident with a fire-work.

We're in the tasting room at Highland Park's five-star visitor centre and Russell has put seven different malts in front of me and told me not to get pissed. He's very good at explaining what are essentially industrial processes in ways that make you go "aah", but I'm still not picking up Turkish Delight off the 25-year-old. What I can say is that Highland Park has a finer balance between sweet and smoky flavours than any other whisky I've tasted.

That, see, is the happy result of a combination of natural and human factors, not least the trace of heathery sweetness left by Orkney's distinctive, aromatic peat, the judicious use of Spanish oak casks that have previously held sherry, and the gentle maturation process afforded by Orkney's relatively constant temperatures. According to F Paul Pacult, an American expert past whose nose, presumably, nothing escapes, the 18-year-old is simply "the best spirit in the world." When tasting, he says, the tongue should tingle and the mouth sweeten; it'll then go dry, but water again three or four seconds later. Amazingly, it's all true. The 18 is a marvellous whisky, but the alchemies of the barrels are equally to be savoured in the 25, 30 and 40 year-old malts.

Forty years, even the 211 during which whisky has been made at Highland Park, is as the life of a dram sipped in a peaceful moment to the long sleep of Orkney's living yet unknowable past, the 5,000 years of civilisation that have so richly left their mark on the place; and yet the distillery has about it a sort of time-honoured purity of spirit and purpose that to the untrained eye at least is the very stamp of these islands.

A greater sense of being out of time, of the past resonating in the present, is made mainfest by the Neolithic remains that dot the landscape: houses, tombs and - great monuments to who knows what? - standing stones. Skara Brae is Europe's best-preserved Neolithic settlement; viewed by visitors from above its neat warren-like, dollhouse layout seems tactile, familiar. All of a sudden, prehistory is no longer recondite: it is near. And near at hand, too, with their brochs, are the Picts, who farmed and fished for centuries before the Vikings arrived in 875 and annexed the joint.

Norse Earls ruled Orkney until 1472. One of them, Magnus, was made a saint, primarily because he hadn't the stomach for a fight, preferring to stay on board his ship singing psalms during a Viking raid on Wales. His pacifism didn't do him much good when his cousin Haakon, who disputed Magnus's claim to the earldom, made his cook Lifolf split Magnus's head with an axe in 1114, but the cathedral built in his honour, in Kirkwall, at least provided somewhere for his bones to lie undisturbed until 1917, around about the same time as Orkney was again playing its part in Albion's "island story".

Scapa Flow, a sheltered body of water just south of the Orcadian mainland, was used as a Royal Navy base in both world wars. The German High Seas Fleet was transferred there during peace talks in 1918, but the defeated Boche decided to open their sea-cocks and scuttle their ships. Another wreck, that of HMS Royal Oak, dates from 1939, just weeks into the World War II, when a German U-Boat passed into Scapa Flow and 833 men were killed. As a result, Churchill tasked Italian prisoners of war with constructing the Churchill Barriers, causeways that closed off most of the access channels and had the added benefit of joining up some of the islands; and the Italians were also responsible for another Orkney attraction, the ornate baroque chapel they built out of leftover concrete, wrought iron and no little ingenuity.

To varying degrees, people on Orkney feel Scottish or British. First and foremost, however, they feel Orcadian. Orkney and Shetland were pledged to Scotland by Christian I of Norway as security against the payment of a dowry on the marriage of his daughter Margaret to James III. A clause in the contract gave Norway the right to redeem the islands for a fixed sum , but later attempts to do so were rebuffed. Norn, a kind of Norse dialect, died out some 200 years ago; but still islanders guard their distinctiveness jealously. Their culture is emphatically not the same as Highland culture, with its clans and tartan and sad songs.

In 1987, the Orkney Movement, a political party that supported devolution for Orkney, contested the constituency in the general election, its candidate polling 14.5% of the vote. Given the extent to which the islands rely on subsidy, it may be legitimate to wonder how much thought was given to the idea. It recently came to light that the Labour government of the 1970s, desperate to counter economic arguments for Scottish independence, calculated that should Orkney and Shetland be regarded as separate from Scotland, they would own 53 per cent of oil reserves in the North Sea; but regardless of whose oil it is, or was, it is probably worth remembering what it is we subsidise - an older way of life, a community not blighted by crime and social breakdown, custodianship of World Heritage and conservation sites.

This being my first visit to Orkney, I wondered whether a place I had read about in the works of George Mackay Brown and others would match up to the unreasonably fanciful ideas I had formed of it: an archipelago whose islands - Westray, Shapinsay, Stronsay, Ronaldsay - sounded like they existed in a song, and where strong-limbed men and women went about rearing cattle, knitting jumpers, leaving their doors open and telling their children stories about sea monsters. Conversely, I wondered whether if I lived in Orkney I would eventually find it boring. Remote places where not much happens can depress the life out of some people. Having been, I am now convinced Orkney would not make that remoteness felt negatively; that to belong there would be to feel blessed. That is not to say that its way of life is invulnerable: islanders think long and hard about the impact on landscape and ecosystems of developments like windfarms; public services are stretched; farmers resent being told by the RSPB that they're not allowed to thin out the flocks of geese that wrack their grass. In Kirkwall, the demise of Woolworths has been felt sharply, and local shops and businesses fear the impact of a planned new Tesco superstore.

But other shops and new entertainments have grown up in Orkney in recent times - a cinema, theatre and leisure centre, a thriving arts and crafts industry, a programme of music festivals, not the least of which, the St Magnus Festival in midsummer, attracts musicians and premieres of genuine global standing.

What's more, that much-vaunted sense of community is palpable, and there is next to no crime. At the airport shop there is an 'honesty basket' in which you are asked to leave the right money when there's no-one about to serve you, while the court reports in The Orcadian tell of one young man being ordered to "grow up" after giving his girlfriend a hard time, and another who simply "entered a house and stared at a woman." Reading between the lines, he would have been down as the local idiot a generation ago. Still, though, doors go proudly unlocked, apart from during Christmas week, when, in Kirkwall, they are barricaded against intrusion from the ba' game. An obscure tradition that frequently results in mass brawling, it is contested between two groups of men who live either side of an arbitrary dividing line. One team, the Doonies, must strive to put the ba' into the harbour and stop the Uppies from touching it against a wall at the other end of town. What greater purity of purpose can you ask of a place?

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald

IF all you knew of England was gleaned from BBC news or the tabloids you'd probably think it an over-developed, pissed-up dump full of people like Karen Matthews and Russell Brand. It's almost as though its traditions, its neighbourliness and tolerance, and above all its natural beauty, were things to be bashful and apologetic about. Perhaps John Major's speech about warm beer and old maids really did do for pride in English heritage, but great pockets of William Blake's "green and pleasant land" remain still undivested of their come-hither fecundity.

Nowhere is this ineffable sorcery more alluring than in Grantchester, a village some two miles south-west of Cambridge that is as old as the Domesday Book. It is often said that the south remoulds and anglicises the mindset and manners of people not from there, but so long as you realise that on entering you are enjoined to scarper on a sliding scale of eccentricity, Cambridge seems to take no interest in redress. And Grantchester - idyllic, Arcadian, a place where time stands still and whose pubs do not sell lager - is where they go, tourists and chattering eccentrics alike, to escape the droves on the college backs and the world of cars, gymnasiums and Wagamama.

In doing so they follow in the footsteps of many of the country's finest minds. Jeffrey Archer, "probably the best storyteller in the world" according to the Daily Mail, lives there now with his wife Mary Archer, the scientist; while past denizens include the poets Rupert Brooke and Sylvia Plath and the mathematician Bertrand Russell. And the list of others to have taken tea or fallen off punts there includes Newton, Darwin, Milton, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, Wittgenstein, Keynes and the Stephens Fry and Hawking.

It was out walking on Grantchester Meadows - the pasture land along the River Cam that separates the village from Cambridge -that Alan Turing first came up with the idea of artificial intelligence. Turing, you may remember, cracked the German Enigma code during World War II. He later lived in Manchester, where, in the 50s he was prosecuted for being homosexual and subsequently killed himself. I was glad when my mate John - also my host - corrected my misapprehension that we were about to cycle to Manchester. Grantchester, he informed me, would be a less taxing journey. And so, he on his own bike, I on a borrowed girl's one, we set off across the Granchester Grind, the path that crosses the meadows.

It would be difficult to prove, but I am convinced there are more bicycles in Cambridge than people. They're like free newspapers: if someone nicks yours you can always find a spare one lying around. It's all very well pedalling your library books and your corduroy around the city, though; a different story negotiating the Grind. No sooner had we set wheel on gravel than briar thorns gave notice of their views on two-wheeled gender-bending. Mindful of admonitions regarding health and safety in old films about the Countryside Code, I wheeled my punctured steed along by hand towards our destination, where I managed to get it patched up and we ourselves repaired to The Orchard Tea Garden.

To sit out in the sun drinking tea under the ripening apples there is to feel the ghosts around you, here Lord Byron expostulating grandiloquently, there Keats, half-demented, agonising over his verse in some shady bower. Just a little further upstream is Byron's Pool, a former mill pond, where the poet used to swim. The mill itself receives mention in Chaucer's Reeve's Tale. No swimming for us - instead we admire the enormous cows grazing on the river's banks. It's a scene that could have been painted by Constable and one that managed to charm even that grim poetess of death, Sylvia Plath. She indeed wrote from Grantchester to her mother of an occasion on which she recited Chaucer to a captive bovine audience, and the episode is recalled in verse by her husband Ted Hughes: "Your voice went over the fields towards Grantchester. It must have sounded lost. But the cows Watched, then approached: they appreciated Chaucer."

Having had enough of jam and clotted cream, John explains to me how the Romantic poets, contrary to what you will hear said of them, were bothered deeply by the cruel degradations of the industrial revolution. They feared "the dark Satanic mills" of places like Manchester but it was because they distrusted the new capitalism, and their fight was for the soul of England and its people. John is learned, so I don't argue, but there is no doubting the poet most associated with Grantchester, Brooke, is unreservedly and unapologetically nostalgic.

Homesick in Berlin in 1912, Brooke, who lodged at Grantchester between 1909 and 1911, first at the Orchard House and later at the Old Vicarage - now the Archers' gaff - wrote: "I only know that you may lie Day long and watch the Cambridge sky, And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass, Hear the cool lapse of hours pass, Until the centuries blend and blur In Grantchester, in Grantchester." He ends the poem with the famous line: "Stands the church clock at ten-to-three And is there honey still for tea?" During much of 1911, the hands of the clock on the tower of the church were stuck not at 2.50 but 3.30; to this day, however, it is always ten-to-three in the dining room of the Rupert Brooke Inn, formerly the Rose and Crown.

Brooke moved to the village hoping to escape a hectic Cambridge social life, but instead he became the lodestar of the Grantchester Group, a circle of friends that included Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, Keynes and the painter Augustus John. Woolf dubbed them the 'neo-pagans': contemptuous of the religious stuffiness of the mid-Victorians and later held to be symbolic of a doomed novocento optimism and innocence, they would go barefoot in the village, hike for miles around and travel to Cambridge by canoe. On one occasion Brooke and Woolf skinny-dipped together by moonlight, although it is not believed that they were lovers.

Russell lived for ten years at the Mill House writing his Principia Mathematica, the manuscripts of which were so heavy that he had to transport them to Cambridge in a four-wheeled barrow, while John, the outright bohemian, lived for a time in a gypsy caravan on the meadows with his two wives and seven children, all male, whose game it was to run around the place naked.

Yet for all he embodied the spirit of his time and place, and the timelessness of that place, posterity has not been kind to Brooke's reputation, mainly because the sonnets he wrote shortly before his death in 1915 celebrate the dream of dying for a noble cause. They are the poems of a man who never saw battle: he died of septicemia on the Greek island of Skyros while waiting to land in Gallipoli. Locally, though, he's still a hero - along with Brooke's and 16 other names, the war memorial in the churchyard bears the inscription "Men With Splendid Hearts", a line from his Grantchester poem.

The church itself is a magnificent old edifice, its nave dating back to the early 12th Century. We were happy sitting Betjeman-like in its cool stillness thinking ourselves the proper aesthetes; though happier still drinking pints of real ale (Adnams) in The Blue Ball Inn, one of four pubs in the village, all of which date back centuries. The Blue Ball is where the locals drink now; The Green Man - which Brooke tended to frequent and where John (Augustus, not my companion) once laid a man clean out after a quarrel - has fallen on hard times, its Scottish owner having gone bankrupt and then been arrested while breaking into his former property to find out what the bailiffs had left.

The Rupert Brooke, which has a fifty-cover restaurant, and where you might even hear Pink Floyd's wonderfully bucolic Grantchester Meadows playing, is also worth a visit. Or so I'm told: dinner was with friends at Wagamama that night and neither of us could remember what the Countryside Code had to say about cycling drunk. So we opted to play the peaceable Scots, scrapped the idea of knocking up the Archers and rode back out across the Grind convinced eccentrics these days aren't quite up to the old mark.

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald

IT is Poland's age-old quandary: what to do about the past. Only pragmatism, Poles say, prevented Poznan's Zamek Cesarski, the Prussian imperial castle built by Kaiser Wilhelm II at the beginning of the last century, from being demolished after 1945. When Poland, having regained its independence in 1918, was invaded by the Nazis and the area around Poznan became a part of the Third Reich - most of the rest of the country was simply German-administered - Hitler had the castle's western wing and tower redesigned to mirror, exactly, his headquarters just a short trip down the road in Berlin.

Most buildings of its kind in Germany itself having been blitzed by the British, the place has lent its mise-en-scene to the odd film-maker down the years. The communists didn't do very much with it - that it stood as a symbol of authoritarian rule was perhaps enough for them - but while it is now a cultural centre, housing a dance school, galleries and a cinema space, it still feels somehow empty, more strange fairytale palace than museum.

We are used to Germans treading on eggshells when talk turns to the years 1933-45, but the ethical equation is different in Poland. The Nazis killed around five million Poles. Anyone wondering whether it would be right or proper of a geared-up Polish tourist industry to hitch its wagon to some sort of Adolf Trail, will, therefore, find no easy answers. You're not meant to feel prurient about Hitler. Pace his chambers and you just might.

All its sad, bloody, violent history has given Poland something few European countries enjoy: perhaps not so much a single idea of what it is but a definite sense of what it is not. Partitioned by the Prussians, Russians and Austro-Hungarians, invaded by the Swedes and the Ottomans, subjugated by the Nazis then by the Soviets, its sense of nationhood is inseparable from its struggle for survival. The Prussians were Protestant, the Russians Orthodox Christians. Of the five million killed by the Nazis, three million were Jewish; only a few thousand Jews survived. Catholicism - not exactly the default religion in northern Europe - makes sense. For centuries the church bolstered Polish national identity; in turn Poles have remained faithful. Religion and patriotism - an endearingly uncomplicated patriotism - go hand in hand, or at least that's the impression. Religious attendance remains sky-high; in Poznan there's a church everywhere you look, and not like the ones in Britain, where they've all been turned into flats.

The Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul has particular significance, having been founded in the year 968 by Mieszko I, the first ruler of Poland. In the shade of its Gothic silhouette - the original Romanesque cathedral was sacked centuries ago - a statue of Pope John Paul II welcomes parishioners to prayer. Old Karol Jozef declared the site to have been the birthplace of the Polish nation, and besides being a pontiff he wasn't from Poznan but a place near Krakow, so he probably wasn't lying.

The Prussians tried, and failed, to suppress Polish culture and language. The communists tried, and failed, to reduce the influence of the church. In Poznan the commies even "moved" the River Warta off its natural meandering course around the cathedral, for no other apparent reason than to let the Catholics know who was in charge.

Now that the Poles are self-determining, all that suppressed culture and heritage has come into its own, while the revolts and uprisings of 1918, 1956, 1970, 1980 and too many other years to mention are everywhere commemorated. Not that everyone is dancing the polka, debating folk art or pining for the days of Solidarity. Western-style consumerism caught on a while back and Poznan is proud to have the "best medium-sized shopping mall" in the world, a fairly impressive piece of modern architecture that brings everyone from Zara to Barbour, Van Graaf and Mothercare under one roof. Let it slip that you're from Scotland and as well as telling you about friends and family who live and work there, Poles - in common with everyone else in the world who watches Hollywood films - will mention Braveheart. Having grasped their own freedom, they can't understand why we're so phlegmatic about ours.

It may be the ultimate endorsement of their patriotism that many of the thousands of young Poles to have sought work abroad since the country joined the EU in 2004, are now going home. In Poland low levels of home ownership should ensure a degree of protection against the credit crunch. The Polish economy is actually growing right now, fuelled partly by a construction boom, while the zloty has been getting stronger and salaries higher for some time. Paradoxically, meanwhile, for a nation that puts such store in its independence, the EU remains almost universally popular, the Common Agricultural Policy notwithstanding.

Poznan, at least, exhibits many of the signs of a city in which business is thriving. It is said that people here are even more prudent than the Scots. National stereotypes aside, the region was historically more economically progressive than other parts of Poland and in the 21st Century has become something of a financial, industrial and scientific hub. The Poznan International Fair attracts some 350,000 visitors a year to the city and in December the great and the good clocked up the air miles to fly in and discuss how to get more investment from their respective exchequers for biofuels, and other topics, at the UN Climate Change Conference.

Polish farmers might well have taken an interest. Food shortages are no distant memory, while the national diet is still very much based on staples, not least in Poznan, whose citizens are referred to in other regions as "pyry" (potatoes) - rather like Liverpudlians are named for their consumption of lobscouse, and not always affectionately. In Poznan you will discover any number of delicacies involving potato: pyry z gzikiem, potatoes cooked in their skins and served with cottage cheese; szagowki, potato dumplings cooked with flour and, um, cottage cheese; and koptyka, potato mixed with egg, wheat, and (why not?) potato flour. Everything is served with red cabbage, but if you want fleshing out a bit other traditional dishes involve lamb, wild boar and herring. It's prosaic cuisine, but rather healthy, and no-one under 30 seems to be fat. The women are stylish and beautiful, all lustrous eyes and Slavonic cheekbones. Moreover, the absence of joggers from the city's streets is surely a sign of rude health, not to mention the absence of corporeal guilt.

The men, you might reasonably conclude, prefer drinking and smoking to anything remotely as tiresome, but while Poznan boasts a breath-taking concentration of bars and nightclubs around its market square - the city's universities house 130,000 students - it doesn't feel either debauched or decadent. Apart from Polish barbers having a precipitous knack for reproducing the very worst footballers' haircuts, modesty reigns. People are hospitable if not demonstrative, cheerful if not exuberant, and strikingly well-informed.

The market square itself, Stary Rynek, has a typically northern European toy-town quality to it, with the sort of gabled, ornamental skylines you find everywhere from the Baltic to the east of Scotland; although its centre-piece is an elegant town hall designed by the Italian Renaissance architect Giovanni Battista di Quadro. A short walk from there throws up the Baroque of St Stanislav's Parish Church - gaudy, vulgar, exhilarating. Head west and you'll find the German-built opera house and Teutonic, faux-medieval castle vying for prominence with Polish libraries, theatres and an excellent National Museum. All of which points to the obvious contradiction that while Poznanians just love being Polish, it's the juxtaposition of the foreign, colonial and native that makes their city so physically appealing.

People here can be punctilious, which is possibly a German influence. They're also fairly hidebound about rules such as forbid photography inside communist-era civic buildings and will happily stand for aeons at empty crossroads waiting for the lights to change. If this is to their detriment, at least they're organised enough to have their new football stadium for the 2012 European Championships well underway, while those in other parts of Poland are in danger of not being ready in time. A city of spuds? One thinks not.

This article appeared in The Herald Magazine