My Hols: Peter James The thriller writer get his kicks on the autobahn and kicks back in France
(The Sunday Times, 11th June 2006. By Veronica Groocock)

I LIKE speed-junkie holidays: skiing, and going to places where I can drive fast. I’ve always had a passion for cars. Last year, I got my racing licence, and I did a 24-hour endurance race for Citroën 2CVs. It’s a great event, held every year at Snetterton in Norfolk over the May bank holiday.

My mother took me skiing from the age of four, and that’s when I started getting that sense of adventure, the adrenaline buzz of speed. At 15, I was asked to train for the British Olympic team and she, very wisely, wouldn’t let me because I was doing O levels. She carried on skiing well into her seventies, though — at Lech, and Zermatt, my favourite ski resort.

I recently discovered Germany, and it’s a revelation. The autobahns have no speed limits, so I’m in my element. They’re relaxed about smoking too, and the people are great, very warm. They have our sense of humour, of irony, which really surprised me. It’s a country I once instinctively hated, as my late mother was a Jewish refugee from Austria: she got out by the skin of her teeth in 1938, and refused ever to own a German car, or anything German.

The south of France is unbeatable, though: the food, the location, the weather. When I was a kid, my parents had a flat and a boat near St Tropez, so I spent all my childhood summers there. I hated my early years at school — I was bullied — and used to live for those escapes. Now, I love going back to that area. When I was finishing my novel Dead Simple, I stayed at Le Mas Candille, in a hill village above Cannes. It’s very secluded, very hedonistic, with a beautiful pool and the best fish chef in France. I was up against a deadline. I just locked myself in the hotel and blitzed it. The actual “being somewhere else”, that sudden change, is often the trigger that gets a novel finished.

I had some catastrophic holidays “roughing it” in my teens. I sailed with two friends down the Thames, trying to follow the route of Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. We camped in a field in a thunderstorm, and in the morning discovered we’d pitched our tent over a stream. No wonder it was so wet. Later, some drunk drove through the camp site, hooked our tent to his bumper and dragged us across the field. I’ve never been in a tent since.

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The only good roughing-it experience was on a trip with two friends to Mount Athos, the monastic peninsula in northern Greece, four years ago. We stayed in four different Greek Orthodox monasteries, all vast complexes totally cut off from the world. We slept in dormitories and shared meals in silence, with a monk intoning. You have to eat in under 12 minutes because you are not meant to enjoy it. We lived their rhythms, starting the day at 2.30am, with prayers in the chapel until breakfast at 6.30 on the dot.

It was an extraordinary experience. I envy such people because, for them, life is very simple. All my life, I’ve been fascinated as to whether there is anything beyond human existence, and to spend five days with people of such immense faith was, in some ways, very humbling. Mind you, after coming back I was badly in need of some luxury therapy. So I went to Chewton Glen, in the New Forest. Lovely.

Last year, I went to Australia for the first time. Everybody raves about San Francisco, but Sydney is much nicer: it’s warm and hasn’t got the paranoid vibe that you find everywhere in America these days. I like America, but there’s a lot about it that disturbs me — the amount of abject poverty in cities, for instance.

I love deserts — I spent my 20th birthday in the middle of the Sahara and found it very spiritual. That’s another reason I love the mountains and skiing. You can feel the power and permanence of nature in places like that. It’s awe-inspiring.

I want to see Machu Picchu in Peru before it gets spoilt. And I want so much to explore India. The older I get, the more of the world I want to see. Socrates said an unexamined life was not worth living; for me, he could have added that an unexamined world was not worth living in.

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