Your daily caffeine habit is not good for the planet. Thankfully, researchers are finding alternatives to ground coffee beans

Name: Synthetic coffee.

Age: Three.

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There’s a great restaurant and bar scene in this surf mecca, plus birdlife and snorkelling on peaceful islands a short ride away

It was the small and enigmatic Berlengas archipelago that drew us to Peniche harbour. Peniche, 60 miles north of Lisbon, is famous for its surfing beaches, but the islands off its coast often get overlooked. Every morning a couple of hardy passenger boats bounce over eight miles of waves from the peninsula of Peniche to Berlenga Grande. We took our seats on deck between sacks of onions and oranges and, flecked with sea-spray and followed by flocks of screaming gulls, we watched green hills emerge from blue waves ahead. At the port, the goods are unloaded with gulls wheeling and cawing overhead.

Seabirds nest everywhere: in the island’s grass, its sea caves and its hidden coves. Keeping out of nesting areas, we followed a footpath to a pair of sandy beaches. The sea is warmer here than at the more open mainland stretches and, at Praia da Berlenga, it is as still and clear as sea-green stained glass and offers fantastic diving.

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Palestinian restauranteur speaks from Bethlehem, where food stalls are sparse as farmlands are under attack

Fadi Kattan looked forlornly at the stalls inside the Bethlehem vegetable market bearing small quantities of oranges, watermelons and cauliflowers. “This stall should be heaped with products, he said. “And over there should be piles of aubergines and courgettes.”

The watermelons from Jenin looked too small for the season, while he wasn’t sure where the boxes of oranges were from. They would normally be from Gaza. At Um Nabil ’s stall in the West Bank market where Kattan is a regular customer, she told him she could no longer afford to bring in the best small local cucumbers or piles of green cherries from her village of Artas.

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Sunday’s Sounds from the Other City festival is a joyful celebration of Greater Manchester’s leftfield culture

On the first Sunday of May every year, Chapel Street, where central Manchester and Salford meet, comes alive with DIY art, music and spectacle at the Sounds from the Other City festival. It is a vibrant public celebration of the “community spirit and collaborative working” which co-director Emma Thompson says sustains much alternative culture in the region.

“Collaboration is core to what we do, to Greater Manchester as a city,” Thompson says. “People come together, and it crosses genres and art forms. Sounds from the Other City wouldn’t be turning 20 next year if it wasn’t for that. The fees we offer aren’t huge but people really get behind it, do it for the love of it.”

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The Egadi isles are said to have inspired the mythical islands in the Odyssey. Today, the largest of the group is a quiet place of blissful beaches, fresh fish, neon seas and ice-cream breakfasts

I cycled into birdsong, into colour, the light glimmering against the white of the low stone walls. There was a spaciousness as I cycled, a lateral stretching of soundscape, big skies, birds fluting. I didn’t meet anyone else on the narrow lanes and had a sense of being completely alone on an island of 2,000 people. Is there anything happier than being on a bicycle early in the morning, heading to the sea?

The Egadi archipelago off the north-west coast of Sicily is a well-kept secret. Italians come here on holiday, but the islands are relatively unknown to international tourists. And an even better-kept secret is that these magical islands inspired the fantastical lands of the Odyssey, Europe’s oldest travel story. There are a total of five islands and it’s possible to visit three of them.

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Wildlife, fossils and industrial heritage add extra interest to this wild cliff walk to an inn for all seasons

The coastal hamlet of Abereiddy (Abereddi in Welsh) is not as sun-drenched or glamorous as Acapulco, but the two places share one claim to fame: both are renowned cliff diving destinations. The Welsh version is the Blue Lagoon at the northern end of Abereiddy Bay, a 30-metre drop into deep green water (it is not as blue as the name suggests), which has hosted the Red Bull Cliff Diving championships a number of times.

The “lagoon” is actually a former slate quarry, formed when its seaward wall was blasted open after it shut down in 1910. While there isn’t anyone flinging themselves from the top on my visit, there are wetsuited tourists coasteering around the lower levels of the lagoon and the surrounding cliffs. Pembrokeshire is the home of coasteering, which was “invented” here almost 40 years ago.

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This new restaurant in Birmingham is tiny, but its ambition and bursts of flavour are extra large

Cuubo, 47 High Street, Harborne, Birmingham B17 9NT ( cuubo.co.uk) . Three-course lunch £30; three-course dinner £50; tasting menus £75; wines from £25

Until 6pm that day, chef Dan Sweet, an intense sliver of a man, was moonlighting as a builder. His site: the restaurant we had just eaten in. There were walls that needed an extra lick of paint. There was some grouting that needed doing. The few narrow, slatted wooden panels, which are practically the room’s only design feature, needed a little attention. Then he put on his whites and set about training the restaurant’s new waiter, the tall elegantly dressed man with the tied-back dreads, who is actually a neighbour and was just doing him a favour. He had to be got up to speed because this was the first time he had worked in a restaurant in two decades. Back then the tills didn’t have touch screens.

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If you want to know what makes the Spanish capital tick, head for its back-street bodegas, tiny tapas bars and neighbourhood food markets

Freshly fried churros, golden and crisp; a cup of velvety hot chocolate alongside; circles of aubergine striped from the griddle; mushrooms silky with chorizo; a jumble of potatoes smothered in spicy sauce; handmade crisps, crunchy and salty; slivers of jamón serrano; plump Nocera olives; and crumbly, herby morcilla … By the end of our first day in Madrid, my sister Penny and I have eaten all these things. A touch indulgent, maybe, but when you’re staying in a city that runs on its stomach, it seems rude not to go with the flow.

Madrileños are famous for eating late, mostly because that mid-evening supper is the last of five meals, starting with a light breakfast – often coffee and a pastry on the fly, before an early lunchtime snack ( almuerzo ), a full sit-down lunch, usually between 2 and 4pm ( comida ), then coffee and cake ( merienda ) and finally supper. Once you understand this, Madrid really starts to make sense: a city of centuries-old pasticceria, hole-in-the-wall tapas bars, neighbourhood markets and dimly-lit bodegas, all crammed with diners. Someone is always eating somewhere. During our visit, it was usually us.

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Recently opened by the Royal Free Hospital, Freddie’s serves up a special sort of comfort

Freddie’s, Belle Vue, Rowland Hill Street, London NW3 2AQ ( freddiesdeli.co.uk ). Breakfast plates £6-£15; starters £8-£13; sandwiches and platters £7-£17.50; desserts £4.50-£8; unlicensed

Today, I am rehearsing for my dotage. I am doing this by gripping a properly stacked salt beef sandwich; the sort of multilayered, bulging affair that challenges the structural integrity of the sliced rye bread which is trying and failing to enclose it. The cure on the thick-cut tangle of salt beef is deep and there’s just enough amber fat to lubricate everything. On the side are sweet-sour “bread and butter” pickles, so called because the Illinois cucumber farmers who devised the recipe in the 1920s were able to barter their pickles for household goods, like bread and butter. This is the kind of vital intelligence I will share with younger companions over a salt beef sandwich when I am a certified alte kaker , Yiddish for old fart. Having just told this story, perhaps I am already eligible for certification.

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