They say travel broadens the mind. Personally I'm not sure that's true, but then maybe I'm just being a narrow-minded non-traveller. Some people yearn to globetrot, to see the world, to walk on foreign shores, all that stuff. My youngest Uncle is one such - he's been all over (and in many cases back again) and in his time has been married to a charmingly polite Czechoslovakian lady who spoke something like twelve languages, and has also written a guide book to sights of Oracles in the ancient world. This, by the way, is the same Uncle who previously had a book about philosophy published. The book about Oracles has not been a best-seller either alas, but then he says he foresaw that would be the case. (Apologies for the weak wordplay, and I promise not to do it again. Unless my Uncle writes another book of course.)

Another case of wanderlust is of course our own Ian Cragg, whose postcards from the Antipodes are an interesting view from overseas. In theory I actually think that I would like to travel, but only because I like to falsely picture myself as the Michael Palin type of explorer, the wry Englishman who can meet such troubles as a cow blocking the line at Calcutta or his ship being scuppered at Vladivostok with a wry smile and a witty quip. The reality of course is that I'm nothing of the sort, and I know full well that if I were to travel the world I would be too shy and too anxious to make the most of it. If you're going to sit in your hotel room biting your fingernails, then why not just stay at home.

That's not to say, however, that I haven't in my time been a bit of a jetsetter. By which I mean that I have been on a plane once. Well, twice actually, because I came back home again. Eight years ago this very week in fact I spent a week working in America; at the time I worked for a company in England that had a sister-company in Rhode Island, and for no obvious reason they decided to send me over.

Actually that wasn't the first trip my old firm sent me on. I had previously, probably a couple of years before, been to a one-day course in London. I went down the night before, taking the train from Exeter all the way into Kings Cross, and that was my first trip alone to... well, to anywhere, actually. My boss at the time, keen to allay my anxiety, told me that once I got off the train there would be hordes of taxis sat waiting. Just get in one, he said, and it'll take you right to the hotel, easy.

Well, the train pulled in on time at Kings Cross, and give him his due, my boss was right. There were absolutely hundreds of black cabs just sat there. Until I headed in their direction that is! Suddenly, as if they were a flock of birds that had just decided it was getting a bit parky and it was time to nip South for the Winter, the entire mob of taxis started to move towards the entrance. I would have been reduced to walking the Streets of London like a Ralph McTell song, if not for some old lady who (presumably like me wanting a cab, but unlike me being rather brave) suddenly stepped out in front of the fleet. The ensuing delay thankfully gave me enough time to hop into one.

So I made my way to, I think, the Royal Horseguards Thistle Hotel. I remember the entrance lobby as being white-tiled, rather like an overlarge, over-grand Victorian lavatory. Apart from this rather disturbing ambience, there are precisely three things I remember about that hotel. The first is that the air-conditioning in my room didn't work properly; the second was that the air-conditioning in my room was very noisy, so that not only did it try to freeze me to death, it also kept me awake while it was doing it.

The third thing I remember is thankfully nothing to do with air-conditioning. As I got into the lift to go to my room, a gentleman in a smart suit and glasses got in too. When the lift arrived on the relevant floor he gestured for me to get out first, and then himself set off down the corridor. It was at this point that it occurred to me that he was probably the English equivalent of a bellboy, showing me to my room. (It also occurred to me that he was quite a surly one, and that he'd better not be expecting a tip.) Said gentleman duly stopped outside a room, and of course I stopped too. And it was only as he inserted a key-card into the lock to open the door, and as I registered the key-card that I held in my hand, given to me by the receptionist downstairs, that it dawned on me that he wasn't in fact a bellboy, surly or otherwise, but was just another guest. I of course did what any honest Englishman would do in the circumstances. I made an appallingly over-the-top pretence of looking at the number on my card, and checking it to the numbers on the wall, before giving a sort of half-mumbled, "Ah, this way," and wandering off.

But all this talk of inadvertently stalking innocent businessmen around the hotels of inner London, is getting me off the point. For tonight, and rather like Doctor Who's overseas junkets in "Arc of Infinity" and "The Two Doctors", I am for no good reason taking this column abroad, to America!!!

Flying was a new experience for me, back in May 1996, and the day of my first flight did not start well. My boss had given me a laptop to take with me, so that I could work in my hotel room in the evenings if I wanted (gee thanks boss!). Not wanting to take it as hand luggage, I had duly packed said laptop into my canvas holdall (a freebie from Barclaycard actually, although given subsequent events I expect they rather regret giving it away). Of course, this was simply my naiveté showing - what I knew to be a laptop, the X-Ray machine at check-in could only identify as a solid, rectangular lump of something metallic apparently concealed in my luggage... Cue a brief detour to a curtained alcove with a grim-faced security guard. A quick check of course confirmed that both it and I were perfectly innocent, and the bag was duly labelled and sent off into the unknown to some exotic location - the same location as me I hoped!

This was not the only eye-opener of the day, either. My perception of airports at that time had been formed from watching the television, and in the days before docu-soap and Jeremy Spake, that was pretty limited. From this rather patchy source I had therefore concluded that all passengers board the plane by climbing up a big staircase on the runway. I didn't particularly want to wave to my adoring public from the top-step, but nevertheless it was a severe anticlimax to find that in reality the aircraft was reached by walking down something like twenty-seven miles of corridor, before finally nipping through what looks like an airlock without catching sight of the outside world in the process.

You would have thought that once I was sat down and the plane was airborne, that would be the end of incident and insecurity for a while, but alas not. I passed a few minutes looking at the top of the clouds, and marvelling at how impossible it would be for anybody to tire of such an awe-inspiring view. But then I got bored with that, so I decided to have a read. But scarcely had I reached into my bag for a book than a horrible thought struck me.

The book I was reading at the time was a very old edition of "Gone With The Wind" that I had picked up for something like 30p in a second-hand shop. But as my hand closed on it I suddenly began to wonder whether this book, with its essentially pro-slavery slant, was PC or not in the US. I would hate to be refused entry to the Land of the Free on the grounds of bringing in inflammatory literature. So I put Scarlett on hold for a week (well, fiddleedee)! Thankfully I had brought two other books with me - one was "The X-Files" and the other "Star Wars". Well you can hardly get more American than those can you. The vast extent of my paranoia can perhaps best be illustrated by adding that even within my hotel room I never dared bring out my copy of "Gone With The Wind" just in case the room was somehow fitted with a detector for such things. Hmm, maybe I'd been reading a little too much of "The X-Files" by this stage...

Scarcely had I been hit with this crisis on board the plane than the stewardesses (not one of whom seemed to look like the lovely Tegan unfortunately...) started to come around with hot cloths. Well, I had no idea what this was all about, but not wishing to appear the idiot I just took mine gratefully, and then cast a surreptitious glance around to see if I could work out what it was for. Seeing other people using them to clean their hands and faces, and generally 'freshen up' I confidently followed suit, but then of course I found myself left with a soggy, lukewarm, and now rather grubby cloth. Ah well, no problem, I thought (the ease with which I'd weathered this crisis had unfortunately made me over-confident in my new role as gentleman traveller) and so I stuffed it into my trouser pocket.

Yes, yes, better-informed reader, you can easily imagine my embarrassment when the stewardesses did a lap of honour round the cabin, to collect (my memory tells me they used tongs, but that may just be delirium on my part) the soiled cloths. Needless to say I didn't fish mine back out, and consequently passed the six or seven hour journey to New York with a slightly warm, damp feeling around my right hip. I had a similar situation on the way home, this time when the trusty cabin crew came round dishing out-- bananas!!

Now I don't want you to think I've led an entirely sheltered life, but I have eaten precisely one banana in my time, namely that one on the plane. In other words, at the point when they were being handed out, yes, I'd had no bananas. I didn't imagine that this would present much of a problem, other than the fact that I didn't particularly fancy it, but after a few attempts to open the damn thing, I learned that it's not actually as easy as every other human being on the planet (and apes for goodness sake!) makes it look. I again surreptitiously watched to see how my fellow travellers were doing it, but that wasn't too enlightening as by this time most of them had already done the deed and were busily stuffing themselves. A combination of frantic tearing and digging into the wretched thing with my nails finally got me through that one. Thankfully this was on the way home, and from my earlier experience with the hot cloth I guessed that the stewardesses would soon be back to pick up the peels; if this had been on the way out, I might have spent the next six hours with a banana skin stuffed in my pocket. Imagine that at customs - Anything to declare sir? Yes, I'm a bleedin' idiot!!

But other than that, and an entirely forgettable in-flight movie (quite literally - I really have forgotten what it was) the remainder of the flight passed by uneventfully, and at last we arrived over America. All I had to get through after that was immigration, where a rather determined official seemed to want to blame me personally for Mad Cow Disease, and there I was in New York, in JFK International Airport!!! In America!!! The main part of my journey was over, and I have to say how relieved I felt.

Well, relieved-ish. My ultimate destination was in fact a place called Warwick, near Providence in Rhode Island, and so I had to get a connecting flight (see how I've picked up some of the terminology there) from JFK to Warwick Airport. This journey was only a short trip, and did not involve a jumbo-jet, but rather a much smaller plane. It didn't do my nerves much good to learn that these smaller planes are nick-named "Pond Hoppers", and it didn't do my nerves any good at all when I saw the tiny thing! With a gulp I was reminded of the quintessentially English Victoria Wood, and her quip, "It was quite an old plane. I sat next to the rear-gunner..."

And now I appear to have reached almost a cliffhanger. Not a highly-charged, tensely dramatic, freeze-framey, "how on Earth will Doctor Who survive his head being chopped off this time" sort of cliffhanger, but nevertheless a distinct "well that's twenty-five minutes, let's cue the credits now and go home" sort of one. Consequently, since I've already gone on at great length, and have only just reached Customs in New York, I think I shall close this column here.

However, if anybody wants to know where Johnny Cochrane worked after getting OJ Simpson off, or what other aeronautic experience reminded me of Victoria Wood, or what you should really never do outside an Italian Restaurant, or where to find the world's only self-deprecating American, or even just how to pronounce 'Susse', I may continue this (somewhat delayed) postcard from America another time.

Postscript - Although I really did not want to go to America for the week, which if nothing else reinforces my claim to not being the travelling type, there was one thing that worked as an unbeatable incentive. As luck would have it, the week I was in America was the week ending Friday 17th May. As well as being the week of the season finales for both series 3 of "The X-Files" (with guest-star Roy Thinnes) and season 2 of "Friends" (will Monica and the guy from Magnum get it on?) there was also something rather interesting broadcast on Tuesday 14th May, at 8pm EST, on the Fox Network. When I left England the previous Friday this date had not been definitely confirmed, so rather than popping out for a quick peek at the Statue of Liberty, or the White House, or even some American landmark that actually is in New York, the first thing I did upon arrival at JFK International Airport was to sniff out a little shop and there pick up the forthcoming week's TV Guide. If you still don't know what I'm getting at, then shame on you - or alternatively, click here [Ed - tomorrow, when the article will be available - cliffhangertastic]