Expect transluscent lochs, deeply forested glens and craggy mountains. Sleepy Aberfoyle comes to life in the summer and has a good selection of afternoon teashops serving delicious home-made fare.By car: take the A879 followed by the A81 and turnoff at Aberfoyle on the A821.Go (0870 6076543; ) offers return flights from London Stansted to Glasgow from £35 each way, including taxes. The Arthouse Hotel at 129 Bath Street, Glasgow (0141-221 6789; ) offers b&b from £80 per room per night. Hertz (0870-848 4848; ) offers car hire for a weekend in Glasgow from £68 fully inclusive.. It isn't really a ski resort: Queenstown, on New Zealand's South Island, is actually an adventure playground. You can bungy-jump there (Queenstown is where the sport was launched commercially in 1988); if you book early enough, you can walk the nearby Milford Track; and I think I heard that there is some sort of outdoor activity at Doubtful Sound. But in winter – between June and October – the main adrenaline sports are skiing and snowboarding at the local areas of Coronet Peak and The Remarkables. Neither has extensive skiing: even Coronet Peak, the more developed of the two, has only three chair-lifts and two drag-lifts serving a largely intermediate area dropping 420m from the 1,649m peak.

Modern and efficient by New Zealand's ski standards, it is just 25 minutes away from Queenstown on the shuttle bus – which means it can get crowded.What The Remarkables – with just three lifts – lacks in facilities, it makes up for in other ways. When I last took one of the ancient buses up from Lake Wakatipu to the lift base, it proved a bonding experience for the passengers. Despite the roaring of the engine and the crashing of gears, the bus ran out of traction half-way up the unsurfaced, 14km track; the driver stepped out into the blizzard to fit snow chains, and then told us to gather and put our combined weight – there were four of us on board – over the rear axle.The Remarkables takes its name from the beautiful mountain range on which it is set, rearing up above Queenstown, and running south towards the peak of Ben Nevis (at 2240m, about a kilometre taller than its namesake in Scotland). The ski area is neither big nor impressive; but it is a pleasant, quiet place, populated by Kea mountain parrots, flying hooligans adept at stealing food from unwary lunchers on the restaurant terrace.Amazingly, The Remarkables did commission a development study from the world's top ski-resort designer, Eldon Beck. Much as I admire his work, I hope nothing comes of it.Further information: . The Union flag may have been fluttering over the Houses of Parliament, but there was one small corner of Westminster that was forever Ireland yesterday when Gerry Adams and three other Sinn Fein MPs occupied their Commons offices for the first time.

Clearly piqued at Sinn Fein's attempt to hijack the longstanding appointment, Downing Street stressed that the meeting was "routine" and "not part of their big day".Mr Adams himself dismissed the "brouhaha" surrounding his taking up an office in Westminster, claiming that he was more interested in the loyalist violence that threatened the peace process.But as the Sinn Fein motorcade of Mercedes made its progress along Whitehall, past the Cenotaph, before sweeping up to the St Stephen's entrance of the House of Commons, there was no mistaking the significance it was meant to convey. As Mr Adams put it, his party finally had established a "beachhead" in England.A small crowd had gathered, curious to know who the television and press cameras were waiting for. Somewhat bizarrely, a gaggle of girls turned themselves into republican groupies, shouting "Woo! Mr Adams!" as Mr Adams and his entourage stepped out of the cars. One man shouted "Terrorist scum!"The Sinn Fein president was watched by six Metropolitan Police officers, some armed with Heckler and Koch MP5 rifles, who watched warily as the party arrived. One of the officers had earlier confessed he had been on duty in Downing Street in 1991 when the IRA mortar bombs landed.A sombre note was struck by Victor Barker and his wife Donna-Maria, whose 12-year-old son James died in the Omagh bomb attack by the Real IRA. The Barkers had been waiting patiently in the cold to ask Mr Adams if he could instruct his followers to help the police track down their son's killers. They were given a polite but brief hearing.Another protester turned out to be Dave Daniels, a former British Transport Police officer who was traumatised by the IRA's Bishopsgate bomb in 1993.

The OCA allows them to claim up to £70,000 a year for staff, £18,000 for "incidental expenses" and up to £19,469 for accommodation in London They will also get thousands of pounds in travel expenses. They will lose only their MPs' salaries of £51,822 for their continued refusal to take the oath of allegiance to the Queen.. John Hume, former leader of the nationalist SDLP, told the Bloody Sunday inquiry yesterday that the key to establishing what happened lay in discovering who sent paratroopers on to the streets of Londonderry. A few days earlier, he said, he had watched paratroopers clashing violently with civil rights marchers on a beach near Londonderry. He told the inquiry: "If they were firing rubber bullets and gas on a beach where there could not be any form of violence – I thought, 'Good Lord, what would they do on the streets of a town and what trouble would they cause?'."He urged the inquiry to find out who was behind the deployment of the troops on Bloody Sunday, adding: "That is the question I believe this inquiry should find out immediately and I believe, if they do, they will get the real results of this inquiry."Mr Hume said Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness, Northern Ireland's present Education Minister, was understood to be an IRA figure at the time of Bloody Sunday. Asked if he knew who was in the IRA he replied: "There was a certain name that was always identified but apart from that name none of the rest of them would have been known."Asked who that was, he answered: "Martin McGuinness."Mr Hume spent just over an hour in the witness box describing the background to the march as well as his experience of the day itself He said: "What is very important to remember about this ... the issue of why the Army was on the streets, the reason why people were having to march, was because the injustice of that Northern Ireland [in 1972] was dreadful – and this city was the worst example of that."Mr Hume finished his evidence to a round of applause from the public gallery where relatives of the dead and injured were listening to proceedings.His testimony coincided with the inquiry's return from its Christmas recess.