A recommendation.

We've just had rather an excellent holiday in Corsica. We booked it through Direct Corsica, and I hereby recommend them. They're basically a translation and money-changing service: their translation service allows Corsicans to advertise their holiday apartments directly to the British without having to worry about the language barrier, and the money-changing simply turns the rent money from Sterling into Euros. They do actually go out there and assess the apartments themselves, so it seems fair to assume that they're all of a similar standard as the one we stayed in, which was utterly superb. It even had a dishwasher. And, when we initially emailed them, they got back very quickly with good advice about which apartments would be most suitable at the time of year we were going.

An excellent service.

Oh, and Corsica Ferries are excellent, too. You can hire a cabin even if you're not travelling overnight, for not much extra. Clean and plush and comfortable. On the outward journey, there was a woman playing jazz on a grand piano. The whole experience was just so much better than crossing the Irish Sea.

One little niggle, though. If I were running a ferry company that plied between two countries, I'd require all the customer-facing staff on my ferries to speak both the languages of those countries. Even if they were pretty bad at one of the languages, as long as they could manage, however hesitantly, to communicate with passengers from that country, that would be enough. Corsica Ferries travel between France and Italy — and are indeed named after part of France — and have at least one member of staff to whom French is marginally less meaningful than Martian.