Maureen Lipman recently said that to make geography more appealing to schoolchildren, they should rename it ‘travel’.
I think ‘shopping’ would be more apt. In the shopping malls of India, the Far East and Morocco, fortunes can be spent on ill-fitting suits, carpets and enough cushion covers to restock the Brighton Pavilion.
Once, after a spree in Rajasthan, I came back with a three-piece suite, only to discover that customs wanted to charge me as much in duty as I had paid the animated shopkeeper in Jodhpur.
So, this spring, when I took my adult children for a tour of North Vietnam, Laos and Angkor Wat, I was keen for any distraction to avoid the inevitable excitement of buying brash ceramics and spices for the
