Hot News: Half of all air accidents happen on landing, says survey

I guess the other half of accidents are due to planes are just crashing into the air then.

I shouldn't keep picking on air travel though. There are plenty of other terrible things to mention about holidays. It's just that the people that own airlines and airports seem to be so very good at making very large and amusing public mistakes. Like making public what an absolutely parlous state all of their planes are in.

Picture of the Day

Making maximum use of increasingly oversubscribed runway space
On the upside, wider choice of in-flight movies. As long as you're willing to watch through the window.

One more reason not to use aeroplanes

Tramps sleep in them.

I mean, apart from the fact that he could have been a bomb-crazy terrorist, eeuuuuwwww!

Air France pilot ‘showing off to boy’ has near miss at 33,000ft

No mention is made in this story of whether he actually asked the young lad if he liked gladiator movies, or whether he'd seen a grown man naked, or even whether he was a very tiny terrorist.

Still. We'll be a lot less bored next time we fly, knowing that the pilot can be talked into doing stunts for our amusement.

Tragic Travel stories: Now officially flavour of the month

This terrific bit from my Times colleague (and fellow John Murray author) Chris Ayres reiterates many of the points made in my book but, predictably, more succinctly and in a slightly funnier way.

This paragraph gives you a good sense of where Chris stands on the whole 'booking a holiday based on some vague information found on the Internet' caper:

These aren't easy times for holidaymakers, that's for sure. With jet fuel now more expensive than liquid plutonium and skin cancer practically a certainty unless you encase your entire body in concrete, more is at stake than ever. And yet there is so much information available on destinations, you need to book a holiday just to do the research necessary to book a holiday.

Of course, my book is still the only place to find lots of lists of great things you can only do at home, stuff about dangerous fish, and some vaguely libertarian musings on drug abuse &c. Sensibly priced too, at a mere £7.99

Marvellous things you can only do @ Home No.20: Get completely ruined and pass out while while your kids are around

...as this unlucky couple discovered, people overseas are a great deal less tolerant than us. Drinking oneself into a state on insensibility is one of the simple pleasures our forebears laid down their lives to preserve.

Our tolerance of different cultures and lifestyles is the key factor that makes Britain the No.1 destination for migrants across Europe and beyond. hardly anyone seeks asylum in Portugal, they're just too bloody judgmental.

Our prodigious thirstiness is something that's less widely celebrated, but that's something we could easily remedy by getting rid of those pictures of a tubby little German woman on our banknotes and replacing them with engravings of scenes from Withnail and I instead.

While we're at it, we could change out national motto from that preposterous Latin nonsense to the simple homespun phrase "We've gone on holiday by mistake"

At last someone's applied the 'all you can eat buffet' principle to booze!

But they're surprised at the results for some reason. The Daily Mail tells it like it is, with the totally non-gratuitous picture of a clown pinching some bird's nipples to underline their central point and for no other reason.

The thing is, these people are all probably perfectly decent at home. It's holidays. Holidays have made them mad.