I spent £1,000 A DAY taking my family to Disneyland Paris - here are the tricks I wish I'd known that can slash hundreds off your bill
Taking advantage of two school inset days, my husband and I booked a term-time trip to surprise our children, aged eight and five.
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Times
2 hours ago
- Times
My Grand Tour: a novel way to see Rome and an eye-opening art class
I wake half-dressed and groaning in a palazzo in Rome, feeling so ruined that I might need Unesco protection. My eyes are bloodshot, my shirt stained and I've no memory of last night, though I'm still clutching an empty bottle of Umbrian wine. It's plugged with a roll of parchment, which I unroll to reveal a sketch of a naked man in an alarming pose. My heart sinks as my memory mends. The day before I'd arrived from Switzerland and checked into the Villa Spalletti Trivelli hotel, a neoclassical pile still owned by aristocrats. Making straight for the bar in the Tapestry Lounge, I sipped prosecco in heirloom opulence and reflected on my Grand Tour so far: fencing in Paris, dining on Lake Geneva, hiking through the Alps. Now, shoulders feeling broader, I was in the Eternal City, where Grand Tourists brought their classics books to life, visiting ancient sites, versifying in Latin and receiving artistic instruction. That night, in the spirit of noble self-improvement, I too would take my place at the easel. So I wandered down to a Renaissance palace opposite Piazza Navona, a ten-minute walk west from the Pantheon. My artist-mentor, Marco, buzzed me into a foyer where fluted columns lead to a marble staircase. I climbed it, past a statue of Mercury, god of messages and mischief, and entered Marco's studio. It was immediately clear that I'd misunderstood the nature of the class. A mustachioed man in a dressing gown stood on a raised platform, two women giggled while drinking wine and suggestive murals profaned the 17th-century walls — including one of a tongue licking a strawberry. 'So, you are the English tourist!' Marco announced, giving my outfit (blazer from Cordings of Piccadilly, cravat and chinos) an ocular pat-down. He poured wine and waved me towards a sketchpad-strewn table. I introduced myself to the women, Umay and Imane, local student friends who had signed up to the class for larks. 'And why are you here?' Imane asked me, though I was distracted. To my horror Moustache Man had disrobed, revealing a rather lavish endowment. 'Sorry,' I answered, still looking at it. 'I'm touring Europe. I'm on my … third leg.' Marco's first instruction: 'You need to follow your feeling.' Gladly, I thought: right out the door. I drained my glass as the model began to strike poses. First, contrapposto — classic. The women began to sketch. I stared muselessly at the page. Seeing me struggle, Marco told me to map the model's body with shapes. I spent ten minutes drawing a crash-test dummy — an oval for the head, circles for the joints — gulping wine as I went. The women, meanwhile, were discussing how to represent light and shadow. But as the model perched on a stool, the wine took effect. My inner Leonardo rose and my pencil sprang to life. I drew his torso, limbs and old chap, then proudly showed Marco my work. He wasn't sure about the resemblance. I assured him it was an abstract masterpiece (classes from £60; Class over, I hadn't improved a jot. Slurring my goodbyes I stumbled down the staircase. Mercury, having had his fun, dispatched me back to my villa. Italy was the cultural centrepiece of the Grand Tour. But I'd reached a crossroads and, like many tourists before me, taken a wrong turn. In about 1720 the poet John Breval had a bit of how's your Holy Father with a nun in Milan. Horace Walpole sniffed in 1743 that Lord Middlesex and Francis Dashwood, chiefs of the Society of Dilettanti, were 'seldom sober the whole time they were in Italy'. And in 1819 Lord Byron repaid Count Guiccioli's hospitality by sleeping with his wife, Teresa. Unlike Byron, though, I'm out of bed, stashing the sketch in my suitcase and vowing to drink wine only at Holy Communion. I'm packing for the Appian Way; Rome is no place to nurse a sore head, especially today — five minutes' drive from my hotel, at the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, Pope Francis is to be buried, and I need to escape before the city becomes gridlocked. I climb into a taxi and we set off down Via Agostino Depretis … and straight into purgatory. Carabinieri wave like frantic conductors as cars trumpet their horns, street vendors peddle thuribles as though they were knock-off Prada handbags, teenagers take gloomy selfies and the whole scene is haloed by choral song. • Jack Ling's Grand Tour part one: The most unusual way to see Paris Somehow my driver finds a road that doesn't lead to Rome and 20 minutes later drops me at a stables. I'm introduced to my chestnut horse, Almy, and my guide, Sandro, leads us on to the Appian Way — an arrow-straight road of volcanic basalt fanned by Roman pines and lined with crumbling ruins. This 2,300-year-old superhighway once carried generals and pilgrims to Brindisi, 300 miles southeast, on the Adriatic coast. Grand Tourists used it to continue their travels on horseback. But Almy has seen it all before, wandering off the road to graze on wild artichokes. 'Bad horse!' I scold, forgetting the Italian. Sandro instructs me to poke Almy's belly with my stirrups and my steed returns to the way with a frustrated snort. We clop through 'a desert of decay, sombre and desolate beyond all expression', as Charles Dickens put it on his travels to the Appian Way in the 1840s. Here, Sandro says, is the tomb of the 1st-century philosopher-orator Seneca the Younger — a speechless relic half-swallowed by weeds; there, a pale pink villa belonging to the Caetani family, whence came Pope Boniface VIII, the 13th-century pontiff who insisted that salvation required absolute obedience to him. • Jack Ling's Grand Tour part two: The off-piste way to see the Alps 'Hear that?' I whisper to Almy. To my surprise I'm riding better than I expected. 'Where are you from?' Sandro asks, impressed, as we return to the stables. 'England,' I reply. 'Ah, you have it in the blood.' I dismount Almy and, after thanking Sandro for restoring discipline to my tour, take a taxi to the Roma Termini railway station. In my ambition to become a cultivated man I had veered off course with my boozy art class. The Appian Way had set me straight — but it was in Venice, my next stop, where Grand Tourists' morals were tested Ling was a guest of Byway, which has ten nights' B&B from £2,423pp, including rail travel from the UK ( and Villa Spalletti Trivelli, which has room-only doubles from £334 (
Times
2 hours ago
- Times
The Mona Lisa millions — behind the scenes at the world's busiest museum
A baking summer's afternoon at the Louvre. Milling around the Mona Lisa are maybe 150 people, all with their phones held high above their heads so they can snap that enigmatic smile. Meanwhile, in the vast galleries surrounding Leonardo's masterpiece, an eternal throng of visitors from every corner of the globe trudges wearily on — most, this far into the gallery, seemingly oblivious to the glorious art around them. Paris's great museum has about nine miles of galleries, spread over 403 rooms. You enter it from beneath IM Pei's celebrated glass pyramid, which on a day like this behaves like a giant magnifying glass for the blazing sun. Many visitors probably won't venture more than half a mile into the heart of the museum. But in this huge, former royal palace there is one tranquil room. Far from the madding crowd, Laurence des Cars, 59, the first female director of the Louvre in 228 years, sits in her book-lined office, the picture of the formidable, Sorbonne-educated Parisian intellectual she is. If she is physically distanced from the heaving mass of humanity trudging round her domain, however, her brain is constantly occupied with it. 'One of my first decisions when I became the director in 2021 was to limit our daily admissions to 30,000,' she says. 'You know that, just before Covid, the Louvre was getting ten million visitors a year? When I got here the staff said, 'Please let's not go back to that because some days we were up to 45,000 visitors.' And that figure is too much. Even now we are saturated. The building is suffocating. It's not good for staff, visitors or the art.' Last month the Louvre's staff emphasised their grievances by going on a spontaneous strike (a 'mass expression of exasperation', their union official said), leaving thousands of tourists outside with no idea why they weren't being let in. 'It wasn't a strike,' des Cars says firmly. 'It was a meeting with the unions because of the conditions and especially the heat. I put in place immediate measures to make things better and we reopened that afternoon.' All the world's top museums — from the Vatican in Rome to the British Museum in London — are facing this same problem: huge congestion, especially around the handful of masterpieces that every tourist has heard of. But the overcrowding is felt most acutely by the Louvre, which still receives more visitors (8.7 million last year) than any other museum, yet has some of the worst facilities. We know this because six months ago a memo outlining its problems was leaked to a Paris newspaper. It caused a stir not just because it was addressed to Rachida Dati, France's culture minister, but because it was written by des Cars. She was jaw-droppingly frank. 'Visiting the Louvre is a physical ordeal,' she wrote. 'Visitors have no space to take a break. The food options and restroom facilities are insufficient in volume, falling below international standards. The signage needs to be completely redesigned.' Pei's pyramid, she went on, creates a 'very inhospitable' atmosphere on hot days. Other parts of the old building are 'no longer watertight'. Nobody has revealed who leaked the memo, but it's hard to imagine des Cars being upset by the revelation because within days came a dramatic intervention from on high. President Macron announced a redevelopment project that he called the 'nouvelle renaissance' of the Louvre. It's masterminded by des Cars and every bit as radical a reshaping as François Mitterrand's 'grand projét' of the 1980s, which led to Pei's pyramid. By chance it will run simultaneously with something similar in London: the £1 billion masterplan to renovate the British Museum, a coincidence that hasn't escaped des Cars' notice. 'I talk a lot with Nick Cullinan [the BM's director],' she says. 'He's wonderful, a great professional and he's dealing with exactly the same issues.' The most controversial feature of des Cars' plan is her proposed solution to the problem of that huge rugby scrum around the Mona Lisa. She wants to remove the painting to one of several new underground galleries to be excavated under the Cour Carrée courtyard, where it will get its own entrance requiring punters to buy an additional ticket (the price is yet to be decided). • The secret life of the Louvre: inside the world's biggest museum She also envisages a second entrance to the Louvre on the far side from where the pyramid is. 'The idea of having just one entrance to this enormous museum was a nice idea in the 1980s when the Louvre had just four million visitors a year,' she says. 'But that was before the Berlin Wall fell, before the Chinese started travelling, before international tourism reached the levels we have today. We are going back to what was always the case — several entrances for the Louvre.' At the same time the museum will be given a technical makeover. That will take ten years, des Cars estimates, whereas she suggests that the Mona Lisa gallery and the new entrance will be ready by 2031 or 2032. 'We are running a competition to find an architect and will appoint one early next year,' she says. 'And the Louvre won't close at all. That's the strength of having a very large building. You can rebuild half of it and still function in the other half.' One benefit of all this, des Cars says, is that it will help people to get to different galleries more quickly, introducing more lifts and better signage. 'On the second floor we have the most extraordinary collection of French paintings anywhere in the world and virtually nobody looks at them,' she says. 'You start to think, what's wrong with Poussin? The answer is nothing. The real problem is that to get from the pyramid to Poussin takes 20 to 25 minutes, and that's if you walk quickly and don't get lost. If we can sort out these problems people will discover many new joys.' It comes at a price, though. The ten-year project is expected to cost about £700 million. Unlike the British Museum's masterplan, however, at least half the required funding is already guaranteed. 'The technical renovation will be funded by the Ministry of Culture,' des Cars says. 'As for the new galleries and entrance, our trademark licence deal with the Louvre Abu Dhabi [which des Cars spent six years helping to set up] will give us at least £175 million. The rest we will raise from corporate and private supporters.' Even here, des Cars has an advantage over her British counterparts. 'When you say the word Louvre people all over the world pay attention,' she says. The gallery has one other huge income stream not available to UK museums. It charges for admission and the ticket prices are about to go up — £19 for EU citizens and a hefty £26 for non-EU visitors, including the poor old Brits. Sounds as if we need to rejoin the EU, I say. 'Please do!' des Cars says, beaming. But what does she think of the UK's generous policy of keeping its national museums free to all, even foreigners? 'I am absolutely not allowed to make any judgment on that,' she says with a laugh, and then makes one anyway. 'I mean, it's very admirable but is it sustainable in today's world? That's a political decision. I leave you to have your debate.' • Best time to visit the Louvre: top tips for your trip The daughter and granddaughter of distinguished French writers, des Cars was a respected art historian, writing a classic study of the pre-Raphaelites before she started running big Parisian museums (she was head of the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée de l'Orangerie before the Louvre). Surely it must break her heart to see thousands of people using great art merely as background for their selfies, disrupting other visitors' enjoyment in the process? Has she considered banning the use of phones, as other art galleries have done? 'I know they are trying but I simply don't know how you do it,' she says. 'We considered it when I was at the Orangerie and the security team said, 'We can't force people not to use phones.' Also I think it's dangerous to go against the times we live in, but you can remind people that they are in a cultural space and need to respect each other, the staff and the artworks.' • Mona Lisa to get her own room in the Louvre And perhaps be a bit more curious about venturing into galleries that don't contain the most famous paintings on the planet? 'We are already making changes to attract people to less-visited parts of the museum,' des Cars says. 'For instance, we could have put our new Louvre Couture [the museum's first venture into fashion] in our exhibitions space, but instead we placed it within the department of decorative arts and now those galleries get a hugely increased number of visitors, especially young people.' As the Louvre's first female director, can she do anything to mitigate the fact that the vast majority of artworks here were created by men? 'You cannot change history but there are other ways of addressing that question. In the spring of 2027 I'm programming an exhibition on the theme of amazons, ancient and modern — from Greek women warriors to powerful women today. It will be a fascinating journey.' And how is this very powerful woman enjoying her own fascinating journey? 'When I was appointed I felt ready to run the Louvre, which sounds immodest,' des Cars replies. 'Maybe I will be a disaster and someone will have to shout, 'Stop!' I don't know.' I would be amazed if anyone did that — or at least not until the mid-2030s, when she has finished remaking the Louvre for the 21st century. Additional research by Ziba Manteghi
Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
The strange rules cabin crew must follow – in the air and on the ground
From make-up stipulations to extreme sports bans, airline staff have a raft of rules to contend with while doing their jobs. And, though many seem unfair or downright bizarre at first glance, most have been devised with the safety of crew or passengers in mind, according to operators. The latest to make the headlines is a new rule from British Airways, which bans staff from taking photos or video for social media during layovers – even in their own hotel rooms. The airline states that it's a reaction to safety concerns prompted by AI technology, which can identify locations from photos. But it's far from the only strict – and sometimes strange – rule they must follow. Below, we set out ten others that cabin crew need to comply with while in the skies, in work uniform, or on layovers. Watch out Cabin crew on most airlines must sport watches so they can perfectly coordinate the pre-flight safety checks, meal and duty free trolley service. They're also essential should the worst happen as, according to Virgin Atlantic, some emergency procedures require 'precise timing and synchronising watches with the pilots.' If a crew member turns up without one, it's instant home time. Stay close While tourists are boarding buses for trips into the unknown, crew members are told to stay near their hotels during layovers, according to a video from ex-cabin crew member and YouTuber Jetstream Ginger. It's to prevent any last-minute panics with getting back to the airport on time. Some airlines are stricter than others: Qatar Airways insists that staff rest for at least nine hours in approved accommodation before duty. Bungee ban According to Jetstream Ginger, airlines don't allow staff to try adrenaline-fuelled activities during layovers because they might result in injuries, which would prevent them from doing their jobs on reboarding. It's clearly difficult to police though – the YouTuber admitted to having flouted the rules previously. Pretend you don't need food …Or a desperate cigarette, or drink after that flight to Ibiza. Airlines don't like staff imbibing in uniform according to Cabin Crew Wings – and, on some Middle Eastern carriers, it could even mean losing your job. Take a torch You know when you're sleeping on a long-haul flight and, suddenly, there's a flashlight in your face and a staff member checking whether your seatbelt is done up or whether you'd like dinner? Crew members are mandated to take torches onboard for this very purpose (but also to light the way to the exits in the event of an emergency). Hide that dolphin or butterfly Another reason to regret that face tattoo? Most cabin crew aren't allowed to work with ink on show (though Virgin allows tattoos as long as they're not on the face or neck). Covering-up with concealer won't cut it on the strictest airlines either. And, aside from a simple pair of single earrings, piercings are banned too. Check your face Though grooming rules have relaxed in recent years, some airlines still demand that women wear full faces of perfectly applied, identical make-up while on duty. Even Jet2 specifies red lipstick for those in customer-facing roles. TikTok is full of tutorials for staff while, in Dubai, Emirates staff have their own Beauty Hub, where they can attend masterclasses on its signature look (glowy skin, smoky brown eye, signature red lip). Know your gloves And use them properly. According to Virgin Atlantic, there are eight different types onboard, all with specific uses. Cabin crew have different gloves for everything from food delivery and toilet duty to biohazards, medical emergencies and everything in between. Beware the suitcase police Garish luggage is a no-no for cabin crew travelling through airports – even lairy luggage tags are banned, according to BA's uniform guidelines. There are clear stipulations on what size and colour (usually navy, grey or black) wheelie luggage can be. Always take tights Ladders are frowned upon, so spare hosiery is a necessity for women. 'In the event of a ladder appearing they can be changed immediately,' says BA. Wrap up warm Coats are obligatory for Emirates cabin crew in destinations where the temperatures dip below three degrees celsius, according to a video by flight attendant and YouTuber Amanda King. Should they forget to bring one? It's instant off-loading. Never accept tips In the unlikely event that your flight attendant has whisked up the perfect martini from inflight miniatures and olive snack packs, he or she will be unable to accept monetary thanks – they're banned from taking tips. Some Americans, who find this unconscionable, have been known to gift food or vouchers instead. Step away from the washing machine According to King, Emirates cabin crew are not allowed to clean their own work clothes. Waterproofed material, coupled with exceptional uniform standards, mean that everything except pyjamas and cardigans must be dry cleaned at the official Emirates Laundry. A uniform ban In late 2024, Delta banned employers from posting selfies in uniform on social media pages relating to side hustles, with rumours circulating that the new rules were motivated by OnlyFans. Take a stand It may seem odd to socially awkward Brits, but cabin crew are not allowed to sit down while passengers board the plane according to the AAG Institute for Aviation Training – hence hunching at the cabin entrance and smiling at harried holidaymakers as they pass (while secretly checking they're not drunk and/or likely to riot).
