UR TV CAST

You can go riding in the surrounding countryside if you can handle the spirited Arab/Lusitano crosses which stamp and swish in their stable.Breakfast is a simple affair as in most of Portugal but the coffee is strong, the hunks of bread wholesome and the home-made chunky marmalade bursting with fruit and flavour. Now the house is up and running, the Count (“just call me Francisco”) has turned his attention to the wider environment outside his domain, and is busy roping in EU grants to develop rural tourism and promote local produce and handicrafts. He has already built a golf course and his efforts got an honorary mention in British Airways’ Tourism for Tomorrow Awards this year. “We can’t prevent industry but we can control it and try to preserve the landscape and the Portuguese way of life,” he says.Combining commerce and heritage is something the Portuguese seem to do well. At Quinta da Aveleda, the largest vinho verde producer in Portugal but still a family business, boxes are piled high in the warehouse awaiting shipment to Rio, Luanda, and New York.

Outside are marvellously romantic 19th-century gardens, where paths twist through the woods and lead to a succession of mossy fountains, follies and black swans gliding on ornamental lakes.The Minho wines have been highly regarded for centuries. English traders settled in Viana do Castelo, where the Lima meets the sea, 500 years ago. Today a growing number of British expats live in this charming little town, with its pleasant 16th-century square and good windsurfing off the beaches just down the coast. The Three Pots restaurant, which serves lamprey in season as well as the tamer local specialities of caldo verde, roast kid and bacalhau, is one of their favourite haunts.I’d had some reservations about staying in manor houses after my first brush with the “stay with a well-to-do-family in their gracious home” concept down in the Algarve a couple of years ago – but this was different. Perhaps in the north they have more of a tradition of hospitality. Or perhaps the aristocracy are more natural hosts than the middle classes.At Casa de Juste, owners Fernando and Ana Guedes (his grandfather created Mateus Rose) were charming people who enthusiastically showed us around their formal garden, vegetable patch, cheese factory and baroque family chapel.

Our room had a 16th-century Manueline (Portuguese gothic) window, with ship’s ropes twisting exotically into a boa’s head. When they said they liked having guests in the house because it kept the spirit of the place alive, you believed them. And there was no problem getting breakfast at 8am if you had a busy day’s sightseeing ahead.NORTHERN PORTUGALGETTING THEREJane O’Callaghan travelled to northern Portugal with Something Special Villa Holidays (tel: 01455 852224). The company offers self-catering accommodation attached to manor houses in the Minho. One week’s holiday during September costs from pounds 290 per person, including return flights and car rental.Return flights to Oporto with TAP Air Portugal (tel: 0171-828 0262) start from pounds 150 including tax. A three-day fly-drive costs pounds 177 per person.FURTHER INFORMATIONDetails from Turismo de Habitacao in Ponte de Lima (tel: 00 351 58 741672).An English-language website, www.manorhouses , gives details of local accommodation as well as background information about the Minho..

I like to watch what I eat,” I said to my waiter. “I find I can get more in my mouth that way.” I was in New York City’s Carnegie Deli, where a pastrami on rye comes with planning permission and a step ladder. A sandwich at this legendary restaurant is not so much a meal, more a building site. Not for nothing did Woody Allen film Broadway Danny Rose in the Carnegie. More eating, less talking – you get the actors cheaper that way. Small surprise Woody is so reluctant to make movies outside his beloved Manhattan The place positively throbs with life. There is nothing you cannot do, see, buy, visit, encounter, embrace, fondle or eat at any time, day or night, in New York.

And it’s big, seriously big, and about as understated as a Gwyneth Paltrow acceptance speech.
Megalopolis. That’s what Allen Ginsberg called Manhattan, and that’s what it is. A truly mega metropolis where everything is larger than life. But more than that – and here’s the rub – it’s so Jewish, the most Jewish town on the planet. Statistics don’t lie, and with two-and-a-half million Jews, that’s 20 per cent of world Jewry living in the one city. I was born in Hendon, moved to Jerusalem, and reside now in Edgware, so I know Jewish when I see it.I guess it’s because we Jews are so much larger-than-life that New York’s excesses don’t seem to faze us Except perhaps the climate Too hot in summer, too cold in winter. Back in July I found myself performing what looked like an elaborate Riverdance routine down Fifth Avenue.