‘I can’t bear places where you can’t open the windows,” says Joanna Lumley, sitting next to me on a sofa. She has just tried and failed to open the windows of the hotel room in which we meet. “And I can’t bear the thought of a year without a suitcase.”
Lumley has become almost as known for her travel programmes as for her acting roles – though nothing, of course, will ever eclipse her gloriously awful Patsy Stone in the 90s comedy Absolutely Fabulous – and recently has been off again. This time she journeys from Indonesia to Jordan, via India, Zanzibar and Madagascar, for the four-part ITV series Joanna Lumley’s Spice Trail Adventure. As ever, she is a great travel companion – enthusiastic about everything, beautifully polite and kind to everyone she meets – and I suspect you will never view your spice rack in the same blase way again after watching her programme. Hold a nutmeg in your hand and you are holding, according to one version of history, the kernel of the British empire.
