Classic images from the days when women were allowed to compete in the Cresta Run, before they were banned in 1929.

A terrified Lisa Grainger rides a toboggan down the Cresta Run for a one-off ladies race.

From the kitsch to the downright bizarre, these vintage postcards are so bad they are irresistible.

With more snow and ice predicted - and half-term just days away - Nick Trend offers a holidaymaker's guide to avoiding the worst effects of the weather.

A new guidebook reveals where the staff from Noma eat in Copenhagen. From the head chef to the waitress, here are their favourite food and drink hangoutsRelaeCobblestoned streets, wide pavements, tables and benches outside small, simple cafes, delis, and all sorts of boutiques … Jaegersborggade, a small street on the outskirts of the Nørrebro neighbourhood, oozes creativity. You find things you never knew you needed. It's nice in the early evening when you can still catch a bit of sun. I often stick around for dinner at the exquisite Restaurant Relæ, named the city's Best New Restaurant 2011. The food is excellent, yet the set-up is informal and relaxed. If I want to have a nice time with a girl that I like, I'll take her here. • Relae, Jaegersborggade 41, +45 36 966609, restaurant-relae.dk. Four-course tasting menu 355 kroner (around £40)Leonardo De Sousa Pereira, chefFiskebarDining at Fiskebar (literally Fish Bar) is a pleasure. It's relaxed, not at all snobbish, with excellent seafood picked up from the local fishing boats or outstanding markets, and good wines. In many places, if you want a sublime restaurant experience, you need to get all fancied up. Here, all you need is to be yourself and enjoy the tasty food. The style is simple, a modern industrial environment. You can book a table, but I recommend sitting by the round bar in the middle. Instead of ordering one main course, I usually order three to four starters, such as lumpfish roe, oyster, crab, etc. • Flaesketorvet 100, +45 32 155656, fiskebaren.dk. Starters from about £10Lau Richter, director of operationsRestaurant FischerWho doesn't like good Italian food? Restaurant Fischer is a wonderful trattoria with a well-prepared, rustic Italian kitchen, the best of its kind in Copenhagen. The food is excellent and the menu is simple and tasty – fettuccine, poached cod, tiramisu. The place is cosy and informal, it's like being in someone's home. For me, it's the perfect place to spend a Sunday night with my girlfriend and our friends. When the weather is nice they set up tables on the outside square. It's good value, too. • Victor Borges Plads 12, +45 35 423964, hofischer.dk. Pasta from around £12, main courses about £20 James Robert Spreadbury, restaurant managerVed Stranden 10Ved Stranden 10 is an outstanding wine bar. Quality wines, proper temperatures, correct serving, and the right glasses. Yet, it's very informal and a place to meet people with a common passion for good wine. It serves as both a bar and a wine shop and this makes the selection extraordinary. I like to try something new and different every time, perhaps with a bit of cheese on the side. Another winning feature is the canal-side seating. I come here with my friends and co-workers – it's hard to think of a finer way to spend a late, sunny afternoon. • Ved Stranden 10, +45 35 424040, vedstranden10.dk. Mads Kleppe, sommelier1105Very small place, very good drinks. That's how I'd sum up 1105, my favourite cocktail bar. In here cocktailing is an art. I particularly like the one called Señor Hansi, with tequila, agave syrup, lime juice, passionfruit and weissbier foam. The decor is elegant and minimalist – and at the same time really cosy, like a living room with couches, chairs, and standard lamps. Not that many seats, but perfect for mingling. And a nice place to wind up the week with friends and co-workers. 1105 is a gem – super friendly staff, and they're very passionate about what they do. • Kristen Bernikows Gade 4, +45 33 931105, 1105.dk Emil Glaser, chefKitjn Cocktail BarKitjn is a classic cocktail bar: laid-back atmosphere, cosy couches, and bar stools – and of course they make excellent cocktails. I especially like their pisco sour. In the back there's an old kitchen, the namesake of the restaurant. And you can smoke here! It's the perfect place to wrap up a busy week in the restaurant with my colleagues and friends. • Åhusgade 14, no telephone, kitjn.dk Sune Østergaard, assistant restaurant manager Cafe GranolaMy husband and I usually start the day here on our Mondays off. It has quality food, a cosy interior and a great location. I usually order a sandwich with chicken and basil, and you can also get a morning plate with the basics – soft-boiled egg, bread, butter, jam, etc. The coffee is all right, nothing out of the ordinary but passable. The freshly squeezed juice is excellent. And I like the decor – French inspired, stone floors, an old grocery counter in two small rooms facing Vaernedamsvej, one of the city's most diverse streets . It's always packed, even when you arrive on a regular Monday morning between 10am and 11am. • Vaernedamsvej 5, +45 33 250080, no website Julie Bergstrøm Orlando, waitressBodegaA mash-up between a cafe and a bar, this is my all-time favourite weekend reload. It's located straight across the street from Assistens Kirkegård, Copenhagen's famous cemetery, and serves the best brunch: scrambled eggs, bacon, yoghurt with granola, pancakes, cured ham, baby sausages, cheese, smoked salmon, crayfish salad, freshly squeezed juice and coffee. It would temper any hangover but I mainly go for the good atmosphere. At night the place turns into a restaurant serving regular full menus, and later on it becomes a nightclub with a DJ every Friday and Saturday. • Kapelvej 1, +45 35 390707, bodega.dk. Set breakfast about £12 Torsten Bachmann Vildgaard, head chef, R&D Sam's BarSam's is outrageous! Completely mental, embarrassing, excitingly silly – and very inviting. It's a karaoke bar at its best. Lots of people from Noma go here – it's open really late, perfect for people in the restaurant business. I found it along with a friend of mine before I started working at Noma, and we fell in love with it instantly. I recommend you go on a Sunday, that's when the waiters and chefs from Noma usually go and you have the chance to enjoy our sweet voices! By midnight at least 10 of us will be up singing. Otherwise it's a casual bar serving beer and stuff. It's a bit on the expensive side, but no more than most Copenhagen bars. • Østergade 17-19, +45 33 149518, sams-bar.dk Trevor Moran, sous chefLa GaletteI like places that make me happy when I walk in. This small French crepe restaurant is just what I need on my day off. It is owned by two French guys who make excellent crepes from organic Bretagne buckwheat, with stuffings of salmon, ratatouille, cheese and the like. Brilliant and tasty. The restaurant is down a small alley – look for the sign by the street – and there is a courtyard for when the weather is nice. You don't always need a Michelin restaurant. On a day off this is just as good. • Larsbjørnsstraede 9, +45 33 323790, lagalette.dk. Crepes from £4 Victor Wågman, sous chefTaken from Copenhagen from Noma + Momondo, the travel search engine and guidebook publisher (momondo.co.uk). The book is available from saxo.dk for about £18CopenhagenRestaurantsFood and drinkScandinavian food and drinkDenmarkEuropeFood & drinkRestaurantsCity breaksTop 10sShort breaksguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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Singing to apple trees, kissing a straw bear and wrestling a keg of beer down a hill ... country rituals may sound silly, but they're good for the soul, says Tom Cox"Excuse me. You're not on the way to the wassail, by any chance?" The hood on my duffle coat has a blind spot, but it was a windy January night in Darkest Norfolk, my friends Jack and Hannah and I were feeling a little shaken after visiting an Anglo Saxon burial mound in fading light, and the stranger, whose name turned out to be Jim, really did seem to come out of nowhere.I jumped a little at the sound of his voice. On the other hand, I was quite pleased. OK, so there weren't many people on the street in the village of Kenninghall at this time on a Saturday, and if you saw three of them, two of whom had beards, and there was a small folklore event being staged not far away in 30 minutes, it would be logical to assume that they might be on their way to it. Yet the fact remained: Jim, an organic vegetable grower from Bungay, had spotted Jack, Hannah and me, and thought, "They look like people who would wassail!" As gratifying pagan assumptions about my appearance went, this was up there with the time an old man in a Norwich pub ran his hand along the lapel of my corduroy jacket and said, "You look like you're from The Wicker Man."As I confessed to Jim, it would in fact be my first time taking part in the central ritual of the evening. When I'd told people about my intention to go wassailing, many asked, "Is that like abseiling?" Wassailing - Old English for "be healthy" - is either far less brave or much braver than that, depending on whether you're a folkophobic sort who runs in terror from people in hare's head masks. It comes in two forms: the house-visiting wassail, which involves wishing health upon your neighbours via drink and song, and the rural wassail, such as the one taking place in Kenninghall, usually entailing a visit to an orchard to sing to apple trees and splash cider on them in an effort to encourage a good crop for the coming year. It sounds silly, but then most things that are best for the human spirit do.I'd seen photos from previous Kenninghall wassails in my local newspaper: it was the kind of offbeat story you got sandwiched between more pressing ones about a village-wide power cut or a peacock that had been trying to shag a petrol pump just off the A140. The pictures – usually featuring a robed, leafy-faced man called The Lord Of Misrule – had intrigued me, but the date of the event seemed a well-kept secret. This year, though, I'd been able to find it out, by eschewing the internet and partaking in the antediluvian English custom known as "asking some people who might know".Folks had their varying reasons for attending the Kenninghall wassail. Shortly after arriving, I introduced myself to The Lord Of Misrule, who explained that when not wassailing he was a homeopath called Steve, and he was here primarily due to his concern for the earth's resources. There was Jim, who was interested in what singing could do for his own orchard. Then there was me, who was there primarily due to liking few things better than pretending I'm in some lost footage of the superior initial incarnation of Steeleye Span during the winter of 1970.Festivals with a differenceWith my attempts to get more involved in country life, my definition of "festival-going" has changed recently. The last two festivals I attended before Kenninghall respectively involved several hundred men wrestling a keg of beer down a Leicestershire hillside and a giant straw animal-person parading drunkenly through the streets of a Fenland town.Last summer was my first time at Hallaton Bottle Kicking Festival, in which the neighbouring Midlands villages of Hallaton and Medbourne attempt to force some old-fashionedly packaged alcohol over their home streams whilst losing a vast amount of footwear. Described by Clive Aslet in his book, Villages Of Britain, as "a cross between a rugby scrum and a civil war", it has few rules, though "weapons and eye gouging" are banned. I was particularly interested, since as a Beano reader I'd always wondered what it would be like to see a real life ball of dust with some arms and legs sticking out of it. I just about resisted the temptation to join in on the basis I'd only recently had my suede loafers reheeled.I've always kept my distance from The Straw Bear, in the decade that I've been watching it gambol and dance around the Cambridgeshire town of Whittlesey to celebrate Plough Monday. A while ago, The Straw Bear Festival also ran an exchange with a German town with its own similar festival. This permitted the more diminutive German Bear to join in the jolly-yet-macabre parade, stopping every so often, as tradition dictated, to grab a female off the street, releasing her only when she had granted him a kiss. The German bear was absent this year – I don't think those I heard speculating about prison were serious – but his straw shoes were filled with ample eccentricity by the bearers of a stretcher laden with "dead" teddy bears, and a man wearing a pretend horse around his waist and feeding it mini Shredded Wheats.Straw Bear is a notable omission from Here's A Health To The Barley Mow, a brilliant new DVD compiled by the BFI, featuring rare archive clips of ancient rural games and folk rituals. The footage on this collection goes back to 1912, but these customs of mummers plays and primeval rugby games mostly continue, and, if you looked hard enough, you could probably attend one of them every week.One element that could be viewed as surprising at Whittlesey and Hallaton is the large number of attendees in the 15-25 age group. You could put this down to the extensive opportunities presented at both for binge drinking, but I think it goes beyond that. Excepting the isolated occasions when racists have tried to claim them for their own, these festivals put us in touch with our Englishness in a healthy way, connecting us with our surroundings in a manner that's increasingly refreshing when so many of us live online.The first time I attended Straw Bear, I did so with the wry, distanced eye of a recent London escapee. I'm still a little wary of it: I find it fascinating and uneasy in equal measure, and not all the unease is the intentional, pantomime kind. But at Kenninghall, joining in the festival's very own wassailing song, 'Dance Round The Firelight', and shouting to scare away the "nasty frost giants" upon the Lord Of Misrule's urging, I felt caught up rapturously in a timeless, wintry, shared warmth. You also know you've had a good evening when you're invited for soup with a man dressed as a fox and come away with a note in your pocket reading, "Call Becky re sheep"."It's very Wicker Man," said Hannah. Alright, so The Wicker Man's setting, Summerisle, did feature human sacrifice, but take that away, and what did you have? You had a very picturesque place to live, with some great music and a strong sense of community. Only this was arguably even better. Summerisle had the songs and the polo necks, but what it lacked was a really good population centre nearby, with decent arts funding and a Wagamama. As we stood warming ourselves by the bonfire, listening to a lady with antlers try to recruit us for her morris dancing troupe, pagan life had never been so good.• Tom Cox's latest book, Talk To The Tail, is published by Simon And Schuster. Follow him on Twitter at @cox_tomRural affairsFestivalsNorfolkFestivalsFood festivalsFood & drinkTom Coxguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The recent civil unrest in the Maldives should not affect Britons on holiday, travel companies have insisted.

Festival on the Isle of Wight will also see sets from Adam Ant and Azealia Banks, with headliners yet to be announcedThe first major acts for this year's Bestival have been announced, including exclusive festival performances from the xx and Sigur Rós.The festival, curated by Radio 1 DJ Rob da Bank and his wife Josie, will be held at Robin Hill Country Park on the Isle of Wight from 6–9 September. Also newly announced are exclusive festival appearances from Warpaint and Sister Sledge, as well as performances from Justice, Hot Chip, De La Soul, Bellowhead, Azealia Banks, Adam Ant, the Horrors and Spiritualized.French duo Justice played the festival in 2005 and 2006 and said: "We've heard since that Bestival has become the festival to play in the UK, so we're definitely excited."Last year's headliners included the Cure and Björk. The headliners for this year's event will be announced in the coming weeks.BestivalThe xxSigur RosPop and rockIndieFestivalsIsle of WightGuardian musicguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The importance of developing a successful mobile strategy was high on the agenda at yesterday’s Travolution Question Time at the Travel Technology Show.

The actor Phil Davis recalls bucket-and-spade holidays in Suffolk and a wet time in Lanzarote.

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My husband claims that men are born with a pyromaniac gene, which means they can light a fire just by staring at it. And that women aren't, and can't. This is clearly nonsense. However, after half an hour spent desperately willing the smoking logs to ignite, I concede and let the caveman take over. Mostly for the sake of the three shivering children patiently brandishing marshmallows on sticks. Whose idea was it to go camping in January anyway?

1. The Mournes Walks by Paddy Dillon£7.99, obrien.ieWalks in the Northern Irish Mourne mountains that take in the rugged coast and beautiful forest parks.

China celebrates the Lantern Festival, marking the end of the Lunar New Year festivities.

Gabriella Le Breton assumed the Danube only offered ornate campaniles and schmaltzy music, but a cruise proved her wrong.

Still not booked your family holiday? Fear not, our panel of experts (who are all parents) will be online at lunchtime today to offer advice on where to go, who to book with and how to keep your brood happy on their travelsWhat was once a pleasure – researching your holiday – can become a chore once you have a family. Not because you don't want to go away with your nearest and dearest, but because organising a trip to suit every member of the family – within budget – can be a bit of a headache. So we thought we would bring together some of our experts to help you plan your 2012 holiday. Whether you're simply trying to decide where to go this summer, are seeking a stylish place to stay (the sort of place you might have gone to pre-children) that will welcome your kids with open arms, or are after more detailed advice on a particular destination or type of activity, our panel of experts will do their best to advise you. Post your question by clicking on the comments button. The Q&A will be live from 1pm-2pm tomorrow (8 February). We will endeavour to answer as many questions as possible but can not guarantee that we will be able to get to all of them. THE PANEL Kevin Rushby, regular Guardian contributor and father of four (aged 22, 20, 16 and eight), whose youngest often joins him on his adventures, from canoeing the Norfolk Broads to swimming with sharks in FijiLaura Dixon, associate editor of i-escape.com, where she oversees their family travel selection, and mother of one (aged 1½)Our regular travel expert Tom Hall of Lonely Planet, father of two (aged four and two) Harriet Green, editor of the Guardian's Family section and mother of one (aged eight)Isabel Choat, the Guardian's online travel editor and mother of one (aged 22 months)Family holidaysFamilyTom HallIsabel ChoatKevin RushbyHarriet Greenguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Due to his turbulent childhood, the young Charles Dickens was extremely sensitive to location and standards of accommodation. Walking around the house of his birth, we look at the significance of each room to Dickens, and how his characters relate to domestic life.Download the beautiful hand-drawn map by Badaude for the tour here to take with you.More about the Charles Dickens Birthplace Museum, PortsmouthJon HenleyVeronica HorwellIain ChambersMichael Tait

It's a standard stop on the tourist trail with a fresh twist: Soo Kim tries out the London Eye's new touch screens.