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Compass Holidays (01242 250642) offers three-day/two-night cycling holidays with accommodation for pounds 81 per person. Bike hire is an additional pounds 49.Top tip: A cycling helmet and gloves are advisable.31MARRAKESHMarrakesh has none of the louche fame conferred on its neighbour Casablanca by Humphrey Bogart. North of the Royal Palace are the “souks”, alleys and squares devoted to a variety of crafts. At the northern end of the souks are the Ben Youssef mosque and medersa, famous for their carved wood and stuccowork. The Jardin Majorelle is one of the most popular gardens in the city; the 12-acre site is owned by designer Yves Saint Laurent and the entrance is off Av. Yacoub el Mansour.How to get there: Morocco Made to Measure (0171-235 2110) has an autumn special at the five-star La Manounia Hotel. The “Pampering Treat” is pounds 738 per person, including flights, massages, manicures and a ride in a carriage.Top tip: Have a “hamman”, a Turkish steam bath.32HEALTH FARMSHealth farms aren’t always about starvation and exercise: plenty offer a range of beauty treatments and most have good weekend deals.

Champneys (01442 291111) offers singles for pounds 200 per person per night. Guests can use the pool and gym or take archery classes or country walks. Ragdale Hall (01664 434831) has a three-night package for pounds 306 per person, while Grayshott Hall (01664 653169) offers medical consultations and mountain bikes from pounds 170 per person per night.How to get there: Champneys is in Wiggington on the A41 near Tring; Ragdale Hall is on the B676, 25 minutes from Leicester; Grayshott Hall is 12 miles south of Guildford on the A3.Top tip: Don’t forget to pack the Mars Bars.33GALWAYThe oyster season started 1 September and will continue until April. In Ireland the season kicks off with the Galway International Oyster Festival, from 24 to 27 September, a chance to guzzle Guinness and oysters (over 100,000 Native Oysters will be consumed by happy festival goers), and see competitors wrestle with unfortunate bivalves to establish a world champion oyster opener. If you can’t make it for the festival, Galway is still worth a visit for the fantastic seafood and, once the fuss of the festival has died down, it’s the perfect spot for a quiet weekend away from it all.How to get there: Oyster festival (00 353 91 527 282). For festival accommodation packages, call Ireland’s Festivals and Events on (00 353 1 497 4037).

Aerlingus (0645-737747).Top tip: Book today if you want to go to the festival.34BERLINIn autumn Berlin comes alight: first there’s the Oktoberfest, an excuse to drink vast quantities of lager and gorge sauerkraut and sausage; next up is the International Film and Video Festival (not to be confused with the glitzy winter Berlinale), which celebrates the alternative scene; then there’s the long-running JazzFest Berlin, 4 to 8 November.How to get there: BA flies direct to Berlin and STA has flights for pounds 179 (0171-361 6161) AB Airlines has flights from pounds 102 (0800-45 88 111). For tourist information call 0891-600 100 or 0171-317 0908.Top tip: Tacheles at Oranienbuergertor station in east Berlin is a bombed out ruin now home to a troupe of performance artists who have buried a bus in their back garden Admission is free. 35STOCKHOLMThis year’s Cultural Capital of Europe, Stockholm is where the action is if you’re a keen culture vulture. Exhibitions and events straddle all the arts, from painting and sculpture to photography, music and theatre.

In addition, Stockholm is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful cities in Europe not least because of its dramatic location: perched on 14 islands divided by lakes, rivers and the Baltic.How to get there: Norvista Travel (0171-439 7334) offers a two-night break at Hotel Sjofartshotellet for pounds 32 per person. And Spielberg had all his life ridden on the wave of energy and accomplishment that said, “that’s OK, being Jewish; this is America and Hollywood, and being Jewish is safe now; that’s all over” But it wasn’t; it isn’t; it can’t be. And he had to face it, at the same time as making a huge, very complicated picture in which he had to do such things as send a crowd of women into the Auschwitz showers when they didn’t know whether to expect gas or water. “I cried all the time,” he said in allowable exaggeration, because he was making the film that had always frightened him – as a showman, as an artist and a human being – because it was about being Jewish. Alternatively, if sneering is the order of the day, it might look to the area of true exploitation – the lifting of private marital pain, unmediated by any fictional device and offering no right of reply, into written form, in the manner recently achieved by Hanif Kureishi and Tim Lott Time, perhaps, for the Bad Faith Prize.. HOW MUCH can one man take – and deliver? In 1993, Steven Spielberg was in Poland, making Schindler’s List. To shut the bedroom door in the reader’s face, claiming, in the face of all evidence and experience, that we all make love in the same way, is a cowardly evasion In bed is precisely where it all starts getting interesting.