As a child we\u2019d often holiday in Bournemouth, staying at the Cumberland Hotel. My younger sister and I befriended the children of the hotel owners, who let us play in the office, where we raided the cupboard filled with Cadbury\u2019s Fruit & Nut bars and KitKats. We were living the dream.<\/p>\n
My first grown-up trip, aged 18, was interrailing post-A-levels with my long-term boyfriend, Richard, for a month. We went to Paris, Amsterdam and Viareggio in Tuscany, which was gorgeous, but we ran out of money halfway through. I still managed to have the best night\u2019s sleep on a bench in Venice\u2019s train station. Even though we screwed up on finances and slept rough on the streets of Florence, we had a great time.<\/p>\n
![\"Cityscape](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/\/948d063c-ac3d-4237-88f5-4248492f486d.jpg\")
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Florence Cathedral dominates the city\u2019s skyline<\/p>\n
GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n
In 1991, while at Central School of Speech and Drama, I was one of six students to be picked \u2014 alongside Jennifer Ehle \u2014 to spend a term at the Moscow Art Theatre School, where Brian Cox was teaching. It was incredible.<\/p>\n
Moscow was beautiful. It was just at the beginning of perestroika [the period of political and economic reform]. There was almost a riot on the streets when they decommissioned the 50 and 100-rouble notes overnight and shut the banks. People who had kept their money under their beds were suddenly left with a currency they couldn\u2019t use. There were queues around the block for bread and the only items for sale in the main department store, GUM, were white T-shirts and jam. The absence of consumerist advertising was really interesting and it was so clean that you could eat your food off the floor in the Metro stations.<\/p>\n
In the middle of murdering Dirty Den and burying him under the Queen Vic in 2004, EastEnders very kindly let me have ten days off to get married and go on honeymoon. I left the set, got married and at 3am we boarded a flight to Phuket. We stayed at the Banyan Tree and four days later, on Boxing Day, the tsunami hit. Our hotel was set back from the others and avoided the impact but that morning we experienced what felt like an earthquake. It was deathly quiet when we walked across the road and there was no beach any more. It looked like a nuclear bomb had hit and there was debris everywhere.<\/p>\n
At that point we didn\u2019t know what had happened and our brains couldn\u2019t comprehend what we saw. We were quickly ushered back to the hotel, where lots of survivors were being brought in. We hired a minivan and bought a load of medicine and toys and helped out where we could. It was horrendous but it was a case of doing what you could. Body bags lined the streets and they were burning corpses at the temple because there were so many fatalities. It was really traumatic.<\/p>\n
![\"Moscow](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/\/25077bde-21b8-4c35-8c6e-52bc7ff760cc.jpg\")
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Oberman went to Moscow in the height of perestroika<\/p>\n
GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n
A year later I was filming Doctor Who and we booked a second honeymoon to Kerala in southern India for three weeks. I\u2019d had a couple of miscarriages and had been told it was unlikely I\u2019d get pregnant again and that we should consider IVF treatment. We stayed in tiny, off-the-beaten-track hotels, watching amazing sunsets on the river, looking for tigers and trying various Ayurvedic treatments.<\/p>\n