Maeve Binchy, novelist.
Earliest holiday memory?
When I was four, we went to stay with my mother's aunt near Piltown, Co Kilkenny. There was a pump in the yard, and lots of clucky hens which were not allowed in the small garden, but were allowed to go in and out of the kitchen. We could eat all the apples that had fallen off the trees in the orchard.
Worst holiday ever?
I chose a place in Corsica that I thought was a village, but was really just a posh hotel complex with desperately expensive wine and a ton of tar on the beach which got into everything. What I first thought were lovely birds twittering in the trees turned out to be awful, sticky-looking bats hanging menacingly over our heads. There was a couple who had met through a dating agency at the next table and we were told, in far too great detail, why the introduction hadn't worked. I thought we'd never get home.
Best holiday?
I think it was the 10 days we spent in Broken Hill in Australia in 1977. We travelled there by a real choo-choo train across New South Wales. I was working for an Australian newspaper at the time, and they wanted a new and different eye on the outback. Gordon and I were worn out from eyeballing kangaroos and ostriches and red dry desert and an amazing frontier-type town, where you could almost see the miners and prospectors who had come there decades before.
Dream holiday?
I would love to go back to Crete, where I was always so happy. I would stay in a really comfortable hotel in Elounda, go out to long, lazy lunches in simple restaurants by the sea, and hear Greek music and laugh.
Who would you bring with you?
Gordon and my cousins, Dan and Joy Binchy. The other three play golf every morning and I sit by the pool and read, then they come back at lunch and the day begins.
Favourite place in Ireland?
I love going to a great B&B in Schull called Stanley House, with a view of Roaring Water Bay.
I love Clifden and the Rock Glen Hotel, especially when the Clifden festival is on. And I love to go to Co Clare for the Merriman Summer School every August, where we meet all our old friends.
Where to next?
We have booked a few days of pure luxury in Kenmare. We were there last year and it was just as good as everyone said. If they can arrange the same good weather as we had last time, it will be fantastic. I will never forget those long breakfasts out of doors looking at a view that seems like a painting.
In conversation with Fiona Gartland
Maeve Binchy's next book, The Maeve Binchy Writers' Club, to be published in May by Orion Books, is billed as "the manual that all would-be authors are waiting for"