Amy McNichol visits Kai Matsumoto in Japan; luxury unlike any she’s ever seen before If you’re heading to Japan, you’ve probably scrawled ‘Tokyo’ and ‘Mount Fuji’ in to your itinerary and circled them excitedly with felt tip pen. You might not have done the same with Matsumoto, a lesser known city in the Nagano Prefecture, surrounded by gob-smackingly beautiful mountains. The mountains that you drive over (and indeed beneath courtesy of some epic scale tunnels) are tummy-turningly high and belly-flippingly bendy at points. I visited in autumn and despite the dazzling sunshine, the leaves on the towering trees were turning that rich red colour you presume is enhanced in the guidebooks….

Mauritius was motherland to the dodo, the dumpy and cumbersome flightless bird endemic to this tropical island lying eastwards of Africa on the tropic of Capricorn. The Theory of Island Biogeography describes the phenomenon of endemic these island species – like the giant Galapagos turtles and the extinct moa of New Zealand – the premise being that sea-locked islands are devoid of higher mammalian predators, thus removing the selection pressure for agility and speed, which rendered organisms oversized and birds flightless. Like the Mauritian dodo, who lives on in its thousands in wooden ornamental form. I have my own Theory of Island Biogeography concerning humans. It strikes me that every…