Mark Radcliffe: My life in travel

Mark Radcliffe is presenting the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards from 7.30-10pm on 22 April.

Everyone remembers their childhood holidays as being sunny.

I have a kind of composite memory of holidays on the South Coast; we used to drive down to Bournemouth and places like that. I remember the excitement of driving a motorboat somewhere in Babbacombe Bay as a toddler. I mean, I imagine my parents were in the boat too, unless they were trying to get rid of me. We stayed in very eccentric hotels, Fawlty Towers-style places.

I’m not a natural traveller.

It takes quite a lot for me to feel at home somewhere, but there’s something about Rome. I can hardly explain it. I just feel very comfortable there, and on almost every corner you’re just confronted by a World Heritage site. I’ve been about four times and in fact my wife speaks Italian so that makes it easier; she has a deep love of Rome and knows her way around. We always stay in Trastevere, which is on the edge of the city with little squares and crumbling buildings. I absolutely adore it there.

There are so many great places in the UK.

You can go halfway across the world trying to find somewhere as beautiful as the Lake District. I had a wonderful trip playing with my band in the Outer Hebrides and I absolu-tely adore the West Coast of Scotland. Those places are just heaven on earth if you get the weather, which you often don’t. And I’m very fond of the town that I live in, Knutsford in Cheshire. It’s still a proper town, with a butchers, and it’s right on the edge of Tatton Park, which is a big National Trust place. I go running with my dog every morning there and it’s spectacular.

I try to take in the sounds of where I am.

I don’t want to go to gigs by bands that I could just see at home. I remember there being a music festival in the town square in Tallinn when I was there and it was really atmospheric and something that I wouldn’t have experienced before. I like things that occur just by chance, that I’m never going to experience again ... When travelling throws up something fun like that, that’s great.

I bought a beautiful, battered guitar back from New York.

It’s a 1927 Gibson L3 Arts Top acoustic, which is just such a beautiful thing. It’s just got all those years of wear in it and every time I play it I can’t help thinking whose hands have gone over it before mine. They probably played it a lot better. It feels like a historical artefact, but one that I will never know the full story of. It’s an enigmatic thing, it’s tangible and there’s something that I’ll never know about it.

We went to the wrong airport on a trip to Disneyland Paris.

I took my youngest two children as a surprise and we realised we’d gone to Manchester airport rather than Liverpool. They said: “You’re at the wrong airport. There is an Air France flight leaving in one hour, but we’ve only got business class seats left”. So I bought four business class seats to Paris. What could I do? The kids were saying to me: “Are we not going to see Mickey Mouse then?”

Toto the cocker spaniel has his own little shelf at the back of our VW camper van.

We’re going to travel down to Cornwall in it this summer. It’s the first year we’ve had it and it’s in Manchester City colours.