Stephen Phelan

THE city of Madrid is no less essential to the films of Pedro Almodóvar than kinky sex, crimes of passion, eye-popping primary colours or gasp-inducing plot twists. Though born out in Castilla-La Mancha – Don Quixote country – Almodóvar made his punkish early movies here in the capital, where the death of General Franco gave rise to a buckwild creative scene.

A BOGGLE-EYED pagan god feasts on the headless carcass of his own son. A humanoid billygoat in a monkish cassock bleats a satanic sermon to a gasping congregation of witches. A desperately expressive little dog appears to plead for rescue, submerged up to its neck in a mud-coloured mire beneath a gloomy, void-like firmament of negative space.

FIRST, a tour of the bare-brick cells and torture chambers of S-21 prison, now known as the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Straight after that, a buffet brunch at Raffles Hotel Le Royal, with oysters, lobster, wagyu beef tartar and espresso martinis. This is luxury travel in 21st-century Cambodia, where every visiting pleasure-seeker pays a kind of psychic tourist tax by looking at the country’s livid war wounds.

ON the morning of June 7, a few spectators gathered by the side of the narrow country road that runs through Ballig, a tiny hamlet on the Isle of Man. They waited quietly, listening for engine noise against the pastoral sounds of birdsong, the wind in the trees, a murmuring stream under an old stone bridge. Then a high-performance motorcycle blasted past, at such concussive velocity that it might have been a missile.

THE 21st annual Moby-Dick Marathon was the first to take place in a blizzard. Somehow, the event had never coincided with a major snowstorm before, despite being held every January in New Bedford – a squall-prone seaport on the Massachusetts coast, where North Atlantic weather systems spin like sawblades against the edge of the United States.

THERE are still a few bars in New York that started serving long before Trump Tower was built, before Prohibition came and went, before the United States even became an independent republic.

URUGUAY: a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, rolled up inside Rizla papers. A nation that shares many of the same post-colonial woes and right/left governmental wobbles as its bigger Latin American neighbours, but has somehow lately emerged as a beacon of 21st-century liberalism, with justice and legalised cannabis for all. The best place to contemplate this might be right on the edge of the land, under the lighthouse at Cabo Polonio.

WHAT’S your favourite cloud? Perhaps it’s one of the stranger formations. Altocumulus lenticularis, maybe, which settles in spooky hoops over high mountain peaks like an alien mothership. Or it could be the simple, humble cumulus, also widely known as the “fair weather cloud”. Surely everyone loves those puffy cotton balls that seem to morph into friendly and familiar shapes – elephants, teapots, diving bells – while you gaze at them against a backdrop of blue sky.

CONSIDER Gotham City. A fictional, fanciful place, dark and dirty but not without glamour or grandeur, where threat posed by petty criminals and super-villains is forever set against the hope of protection and salvation symbolised by The Batman.

PHOTOGRAPHY and manned flight are roughly the same age. The latter may be a little older – the Montgolfier brothers sailed over Annonay, France in a hot-air balloon some 30 years before Nicephore Niepce took the first heliographic picture from the window of his Burgundy estate in 1826. But aerial photography was born soon after that, as balloonists brought some of the earliest cameras aloft in their baskets, while Victorian meteorologist E.D. Archibald tied them to kites, with explosive charges on a timer to trigger the shutter.