On the Road: Joanna Lumley Louise Flind

Anything you can’t leave home without? For the documentaries, a torch, a penknife, drawing things, rubbers, pens, Sellotape and a compass.

Something you really miss when abroad? Home and salted peanuts.

Do you travel light? No – because I quite often have to take clothes to wade through an ice swamp or meet the president.

Earliest childhood holiday memories? We didn’t have them. But we were in Malaya at the time of the emergency. My father was ADC to General Templer. Wearing a cardigan going up into the hills (normally I wore just a cotton dress), the smell of wood smoke for a fire to warm a house and the extraordinary scent of roses – it was like a fairy dream.

Thoughts on the coronavirus? I’m old enough to remember Asian flu. It was 1957 and we all had to be confined to dormitories; even the nuns got ill. I don’t think I did because I’m not often ill.

Did you go on any exotic locations in your modelling career? Exotic at the time because it was in the middle of the Cold War – going to Russia for six days on Aeroflot, which had string overhead lockers and people stuffed things like Primus stoves and chickens in them. Plastic bowls were slammed down in front of us, and then a cross-looking woman came round with a huge serving spoon and thwacked a mass of caviar in – and Russia was the grimmest place.

Your favourite place in the Caribbean, now that you’ve just done a series there? I loved Cuba.

Was it upsetting visiting Haiti? Horrifying and heartbreaking.

Where did you film The New Avengers? Both series were done at Pinewood

Studios, and all kinds of people would walk through: movie stars and people dressed as Cybernauts and others from Jane Austen. It was like a kind of Hollywood.

What about On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in 1969? In Switzerland, right up in the Bernese Oberland, in a village called Mürren. We caught the cable car up to the Schilthorn, a vast mountain with a restaurant on top.

And The Wolf of Wall Street in 2013? In New York. Dicaprio’s character, Belfort, comes to see his wife’s aunt – me – supposedly in London. Martin Scorsese hates flying, so they rigged up a park in Brooklyn to look like Hyde Park.

What’s your favourite place in London? I’ve fallen in love with Clerkenwell – it’s part of old, old London and still feels like that.

And the world? Kashmir, where I was born.

Are you a traveller? Yes, and a good one. I’m not afraid. I’ve slept on concrete floors and under shrunken heads. I had a week on a desert island.

Where did you go on honeymoon? Stevie and I didn’t have a honeymoon: we got married after his last performance at Scottish Opera [Stephen Barlow is an opera conductor] and stopped in Harrogate for the night.

Do you go on holiday? No, we don’t. We’ve got a cottage in Scotland and whenever we can, in normal times, we pack and run to the hills.

Do you lie on the beach? No. I’d love to. I’d like to look as though I were made out of crocodile skin – so cracked, old, brown and leathery, with Ambre Solaire spread over everything.

Do you have a daily routine even when you’re away? No. I’m always filming – up early, and there’s either a candle or a ghastly light I do my make-up vaguely under.

Are you brave with different food abroad? Yes, but I’m vegetarian and in countries that might not understand, I say, ‘It’s against my religion to eat meat or fish.’

The strangest thing you’ve ever eaten? In Japan on a bullet train I took a bite of dumplings that completely silenced me. It was like eating a bit of your duvet.

Your best experience in restaurants when abroad? Curries in Sikkim in India.

Have you made friends when you’ve been away? Quite often the friends you make are the fixers.

Do you have a go at the local language? Yes, as a courtesy.

Biggest headache? Is there an iron?

What is the strangest place you’ve ever slept in while being away? I think in an orange single tent in the Nubian Desert with a lot of men, and nowhere to go to the lavatory.

Do you like coming home? Love it.

Top travelling tips? If you’re far away, phoning somebody when they’re trying to unblock the sink at home and telling them about the herd of elephants that just charged you doesn’t really work. Write an email.

Is there anything you’d like to plug? Eat less meat and less fish.