They have found a way to enjoy the British seaside, simultaneously keeping and looking cool while whizzing across the waves, powered only by the wind and sometimes at speeds that would cost a motorist three penalty points.Anyone can do it, from age eight to 80, and it’s never too late to start. This week, a hotel in Ireland got in touch to check a writer’s credentials, but unfortunately only after the guest had checked out. Clear winner, though, remains the chap who enjoyed a week of luxury in Antigua while purporting to work for The Independent.. Next time you are grilling gently on the beach, turning a delicate shade of lobster and hoping forlornly that only a moderate amount of sand has worked its way into your underwear, Walkman and egg sandwiches, spare a moment to study the windsurfers gliding gently across the shallow waters just beyond the shoreline. Few are nut-brown Adonises, with toned muscles rippling and blond manes flowing This is not California Most are – well, just like the rest of us.

Windsurfing, like many of the people who now do it, has come of age.
The biggest difference between participants and beach-bound observers is that the participants are having fun. Earlier this month, one page of a rival’s travel section credited “the five-star Kempinski Hotel Corvinus.. rooms from pounds 140″ in Budapest. Is the writer who enjoyed that one more in favour than the journalist who travelled to Skegness “as a guest of East Lindsey District Council’s Leisure and Tourism Department”?The travel section of The Independent might not be able to afford too many five-star places, but neither are we so strapped for cash that we have to ask a local authority to cough up pounds 17 for a night in a B&B.Meanwhile, our file of people who have hoodwinked the travel industry into providing a freebie because they claim to be writing for us grows ever fatter. We may not always get them absolutely right, but our intention is always to dig out the best value for you.careful study of those “exclusive mentions” can lead you to speculation about office politics at other newspapers.

We believe you have the right to get a fair picture of the options.We spend a lot of time researching fact files, to try to find the best deals. The same Qantas executive told me that the airline would demand an “exclusive mention” in return for a free flight. In other words, even though there are 50 ways to leave the UK bound for Australia, the travel information accompanying the story would mention only one airline.The Independent owes no travel company any favours, and we intend to remain out of the industry’s debt. A story doing the rounds in travel-writing circles tells how a small, specialist tour operator announced plans to introduce a nominal charge for journalists on press trips. A travel editor (not from a national newspaper) was so incensed at what she regarded as a dangerous precedent that she vowed never even to mention the company in her pages again.freebies can also cause that fact file at the end of the story to be economical with the facts.