Since I became a globetrotter five years ago, I have learned that some holiday destinations provoke an immediately favourable response from people, like sex and chocolate. Admit you're going to the Bahamas or Las Vegas, for instance, and your interrogator will swoon "Oooo... gorgeous." If you say you're going to Belgium or Sark, on the other hand, they'll giggle and say, "Poor you! Are you being punished for something?" Then there are the in-between places; Madeira is one of these. When I told people I was going there, they looked blank for a minute and then said, "So. Is that good or bad?" I'm here to tell you that it's very, very good, for several reasons.
First, Madeira is only three and a half hours away on the plane. Three and a half hours! Frankly, and I know it sounds spoilt, I couldn't have looked at another long-haul holiday this year, though I'll probably get over it by, oh, next February. I've never had a long-haul holiday that wasn't overshadowed by the spectre of the return flight. But three and a half hours is just time enough to toy with a cold drink and a hot boy, bolt down an airport novel, take a light lunch and draw "Aagh! We're all going to perish!" speech bubbles on the safety procedure cartoons.
And for such a short flight, Madeira is hot; even in its winter months, December and January, it was hot enough to swim in the Atlantic. In summer, it can be hotter than Brazil. To make it even better, they're on exactly the same time as us.
There are drawbacks. The phrase "Rain stopped play" takes on a whole new meaning in Madeira. Its strange climate means that while we were there, there was snow on the mountains yet we were swimming in a warmish sea. One of the ways that Madeirans get their kicks, apparently, is to drive up into the snowy mountains, build a snowman, stick him on the roof-rack and watch him melt as he's driven back down into the noon-day heat - it must be post-modern or something. But, in compensation for the rain, you get the amazing flora of Madeira, whereby blooms that would cost you £7 a head in a poncey London bouquet here grow as high as a horse by the roadsides.
There are no beaches - Madeira is built on a towering volcanic crater that looms over the sea like an ocean-liner. To make up for this, though, it is covered with the most gorgeous swimming pools. Outdoor swimming pools and lidos are my passion and, since I've been going abroad, I've been really disappointed, especially in the Caribbean and the US, at the way one can invariably stand up in them, even at the "deep" end, and the way there have to be more lifeguards than swimmers. But in Madeira, they're good and deep, with negligible fussing.
Perhaps one of the reasons for this is that there are so few children around. Tourists here tend to be quite a bit older than the average; ideally, you could dump your teenage children on the nearby Canary Islands and then come here for a bit of grown-up R&R. Suitably, the harbour capital of Funchal - all white houses, black shutters and terracotta roofs; Gothic Lite and a bit like the magic city in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - also resembles Torquay (and I say this as one who loves Torquay beyond all other places) if God had got angry and thrown it against a huge wall.
You've never seen a place built on such a steep incline - one day we went up so far into the mountains that we literally had our heads in the clouds. This, along with the riot of flowers, gives Madeira a slightly strange, unbalanced look. There is a distinct air of eccentricity about the place, which sits pleasingly alongside the reserve of the Portuguese-descended islanders. Think about it, the Portuguese must be the most unknowable, unclassifiable people in Europe, despite the amount of tourists who've been there. We all know what a typical Frenchman, Italian or German is like, but what character traits sum up the Portuguese?
This eccentricity seems like complete and utter madness when you go out on a boat along the coastline of Madeira and look at the layers of volcanic rock and the petrified lava trails; once more, you have to marvel at mankind's ingenuity and bull-headedness. "Here's an old volcano - I'll live on it, I will! And, furthermore, I'll make it a floating flower shop!"
The effort that has gone into making Madeira blossom - without aid of tractors, thanks to its severe slopes - can be seen everywhere, even in the national dance. These are usually jolly, mindless affairs, but the Madeiran version is all about the back-breaking bending it takes to till the soil - to the unitiated, it can look as though the dancer has dropped a contact lens and is doing his or her level best to find it. Another dance, the Ponto do Sol, recalls the island's involvement with slavery, as the dancers move with bowed heads, their feet shuffling as though chained. Ibiza it isn't.
But again, this is Madeira's strength rather than its weakness. For surely Ibiza could never live up to the high standards of Reid's Palace, the strange and beautiful hotel which, set in 10 acres of sub-tropical garden, looms 150 feet above the Atlantic like a House of Usher dedicated to service and excellence. The dream of a young Scot, William Reid - who arrived in Madeira in 1886 with £5 in his pocket but died just before its completion in 1891 - Reid's is one of those hotels, like Raffles in Singapore, that people actually visit for itself as opposed to the country around it and, of course, for the sheer snob appeal of the people who have stayed there before; in this case, not only all the royal white trash of Europe but GB Shaw, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gregory Peck (they made "Moby Dick" here - no cracks), the Sitwells, Albert Schweitzer, John dos Passos, Anthony Eden and Lloyd George.
Most famously, though, Reid's was the choice of the ailing Winston Churchill, who first arrived in January 1950, understandably exhausted after a lifetime of getting drunk and saving civilisation as we know it. The Churchills occupied a suite of rooms on the ground floor, which had been Lloyd George's holiday home a quarter of a century earlier. This is where we stayed.
Churchill wouldn't have had the fax machine or the TV at the foot of the bed that rose out of a large silver box with a flick of a switch, but he would have appreciated the Illustrated London News and the ashtrays everywhere, which even to a non-smoking wretch such as I signalled a haven of civilisation and tranquillity.
There were old Vicky cartoons of him all over the suite - as a cowboy and as Sir Walter Raleigh - and one of his watercolours of the nearby harbour town of Camara de Lobos in the vestibule. It was very weird, in a nice kind of way, to sit in his drawing room with the radio tuned to a strange, un-named, ghost station that played song after song from the Thirties and Forties: Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree, I'll Be Seeing You and all the Glenn Miller tunes.
But it would be wrong to indicate that Reid's is some sort of mausoleum. It is run with the sort of sumptuous efficiency that is thrilling in an almost sexual way, like being in bed with someone who knows eactly what you want without you telling them (in my case, these days, this is usually a hot-water bottle). Everything worked beautifully. The bathroom, for instance, held the only shower attachment (there was also a separate shower room) I've ever come across which had to be approached as though it was a jet-ski every time you wanted to rinse your hair, so powerful and likely to leap out of your hand was it if you turned it up too high.
Extremely clean, we took ourselves off to the cocktail bar to drink champagne cocktails made with the passion-fruit juice that is so ubiquitous on this island (also used to make Maracuja, the local soda) and thence to Les Faunes, one of its four restaurants. Picasso used to draw on the tablecloths here, but I told my sweetie that perhaps he shouldn't. Instead, we ate duck and artichoke paté, scallops wrapped in spinach, beef tenderloin with celery and parmesan and drank a gorgeous Portuguese wine, João Pires. (There's another Portuguese wine called BSE that I didn't much like the sound of.)
We could hear the piano next door, playing all those songs that make you feel really glad to be modern and complex and divorced: It's Almost Like Being in Love, The Lady is a Tramp and Night and Day. It was swoonsome.
Back in our suite, instead of the usual crap satellite channels showing films starring Melanie Griffiths and Steve Guttenberg, we could have ordered up from the Oscar Library, offering every winner of Best Film from 1928 to 1998. Instead, we found the TV equivalent of the ghost radio station, and were amazed to be confronted with Fred Astaire singing There's a Small Hotel, followed by Nice Work If You Can Get It. You really couldn't make it up.
The danger of a hotel like Reid's, combined with the tendency towards rain, is that it's so tempting just to stay put; especially if you're with someone you really like. It's so nice to sit having tea on the terrace, watching the luxury liners carry their lush burden of sorrows, and feeling like a Noel Coward heroine driven into exile by unspecified scandalous behaviour.
"Do you miss England terribly, darling?"
"Terribly, darling. But I could murder another ginja [cherry liquor]. Cheers!"
On the third day, we made ourselves go out for one of the notorious toboggan rides. To do this, you have to get to Monte, the hill town above Funchal where in the 19th century the wealthy merchants and aristocratic European immigrants built their gorgeous homes, or quintas, away from the bustle of Funchal. If you like museums and gardens, you're in for a big treat; I don't and desperately needed to be thrilled or scared or both in order to clear my head. One 10-minute ride in the toboggans of Monte - wicker chairs attached to basic sleds - with two men pushing and pulling you down the staggeringly steep three-mile hill leading back down to Funchal, will take 10 years off your life and stay with you forever.
Funchal could never be mistaken for one of the great cities of the world. But the lights reflected magically off the lovely monochrome mosaics of the pavements and squares, and the people are charming, with none of the smarm that passes for charm in Americanised tourist haunts. It's not the sort of place that you can imagine wanting to come back to time after time, but it is a place you can imagine wanting to live in, which is surely more of a compliment.
Madeira is a strange and beautiful island, whose respectability hides a basic non-conformity. The week we were there, the first McDonald's opened; in any other country you'd have had a riot as people pushed and shoved to purchase their quarter pound of the American Dream, but the Madeirans were altogether more reserved, examining the outside menu for ages, often walking away with a smile and a shake of the head.
We watched as four old men in their generation's preferred rig of suits and berets (leather jackets are favoured by men under 45), fags in mouth (everyone in Funchal smokes in the street), approach and peer in. Two of them decided to risk it; the other two pulled them back. They stood on the pavement debating the matter for a good five minutes before the two rebels took the plunge, their friends walking away shaking their heads.
Even teenagers who had muscled in enthusiastically came out looking somewhat confused and dismayed. "Was that the great McDonald's experience? Is that all there is?" Tellingly, it opened the day after, not before, their independence day. Though I was only there for a week, it seems to me that the Madeirans - unlike other nations, both richer and poorer - would never knowingly compromise their national pride; not even for extra fries.
The practicals
Julie Burchill travelled to Madeira with Cadogan Holidays (023 808 28303). Seven nights at the five-star Reid's Palace hotel in Funchal starts from £835pp, based on two sharing and including scheduled return flights from Gatwick with British Airways and accomodation with breakfast.
