You may remember last week that British people are being told to stay home and think about what they've done thanks to the chaos at the passport agency. Well, that punishment looks even more cruel given the context of the power of the British passport.

We came across this great infographic, which shows you which countries have the most powerful passports in terms of which other countries you can go to without having to get special visas, write lengthy begging letters to the government, sneak in in someone's hand luggage, etc.

At the front of the VIP section and being waved in under the velvet rope of immigration are Finland, Sweden and the UK. Their perennial plus-ones include Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg (sneaky little devils) and of course, everyone's entitled young cousin, the USA. Over 170 countries welcome all these nations with open arms.

Looking rather like their dance card is empty are the countries that virtually no-one will let in without a severe pat-down and police background check are places such as Pakistan and Somalia (32 countries), Iraq (31) and poor old Afghanistan, which has visa issues with all but 28 friends on this planet.

Of the big economies, it's surprising that China is so far down the list - just 43 countries lay out the welcome mat for them, though given the stories we've heard about trying to get visas to get INTO China, they might want to show a little willing to get invited to the cool kids' parties.

"Now, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ground you. But look, you've got LOTS of great things you can do in your bedroom. You've got that jigsaw you've never opened, and how about a game of Monopoly or something with your brother?"

"Aw, mum...all my mates are out drinking strong continental lager and snorting suncream on a sun-drenched tropical idyll..."

"I really think this is the perfect time for you to rediscover how much fun your bedroom is."

And so seems to be the rhetoric of Helen Grant, as she issues forth her regal decree from a five star suite in Rio as she watches England try and play football. The Passport Office - as badly managed and beleaguered as our national side's defence - has collapsed under the weight of its own application process with a similarly reassuring sense of predictability. Grant - Minister for Tourism (and Sport - coincidence?) spins this by telling people whose holiday plans lie in ruins that they've won the summer lottery and they'll have so much fun just, er, staying in Britain. Hear are the actual, real words she spoke from her mouth:

"If they don't want to go away, we have some fantastic places to visit and holiday not that far from here. I think there's a lot to be said for the 'staycation'. People need to do what they like."

She added: "I think we are going to have a great summer, we are certainly going to have a great summer of sport, too, there's lots of opportunities to build your holiday around a spoilt-for-choice list of events, the Tour de France Grand Départ, we've got the golf, we've got the Commonwealth Games, we've got football that we can watch on the TV. It's a wonderful place to have your holiday."

Cue bouts of everyman and woman fury in the press, as people perhaps rightly see their basic right to cross international borders with timely applications for a passport being stripped away before their astonished faces. And then being told how lucky they are. A bit like...being peed on and told it's a refreshing summer rain shower.

All together, now: There ain't no staycation like a Helen Grant staycation 'cos a Helen grant staycation is COMPULSORY.

Ever wonder JUST WHY some hotels leave chocolates on your pillow? US NEITHER, but glambot surrealist Eddie Izzard offers one theory as he wades his way through the US and stops at St Louis:

So this kind of snuck up on us. We were so engrossed in the amazing interviews we have lined up for the next issue that we almost didn't notice it was our first birthday this weekend!

Good job then, that we have some great features and reviews lined up for next week, when our anniversary newsletter and one year edition will go live. Look out for us, and Heston Blumenthal, in your inbox.

We all do them, even though we know we're not exactly being original. But deep down, we know that the old 'point the camera out of the plane window and snap a sunrise/sunset/amusing-shaped cloud' move is one of the more cliched things we can do in a plane.
    That's not to say that you can't capture some great wacky colours and atmospherically jetset views or anything. It's just that...everyone takes that shot, you know? Including us. Every time. There's no shame in it.
However, step forward Alex Merga, who has just RUINED THE ENTIRE ENTERPRISE FOR EVERYONE EVER by nonchalantly peering out over the wing of his 757 flight from London to New York and taking a casual shot of OH, THE MILKY WAY. Way to raise the bar to an incredibly high standard there, Merga.
    Actually, the process sounds far from nonchalant, and it sounds like he had to hunker down and do some pretty intense photography tweaking. He may even have missed out on one of the inflight meals, who knows? Either way, the story is told in more detail right here. Nicely done, sir. Can we interest you in a blurry sunset over Cleveland? No? Oh well, suit yourself. (thanks to @Co_Semie for the link).

I wasn’t always this pan-continental globe-botherer. The carefree jaunt-taker, the fearless travel warrior, of whose work some of the country’s most respected editors have said, “There’s just a couple of minor grammatical points with this draft, can you take a quick look at them and have it back by Friday?”

No. Once I was a mere mortal who knew nothing of this big blue marble we call the Planet Earth.

Reader, do you remember the mid 1980s? Simpler times, weren’t they? Ordinary folk could just cobble together their own passports at home and airport metal detectors were strictly voluntary. That’s how I remember it.

Up until then, our family holidays had been unswervingly domestic. I like to think we were extreme early adopters, predating ‘staycationing’ by some 20 years, my parents among the first acolytes of a movement that would come to grace so many future newspaper travel sections.

A more accurate truth, though, is that my parents simply liked unassuming coastal towns such as Fleetwood and Torquay, and so the first decade or so of the travelling life I can remember was spent bickering with my brother in sweaty car back seats on our way to old-school English seaside resorts.

In 1986, that all changed, and none of us would be the same again.

Finally accepting the idea of nosing out into the sphere of geography hereto suspiciously referred to as “abroad”, the Oswells ventured forth towards Spain, exalted hosts of that year’s football World Cup and ever-growing hordes of boozed-faced British holidaymakers.

Our destination: Salou, a touristic hub in Catalonia in north-eastern Spain, just outside Barcelona. I’d like to think it was the fiercely proud Catalan spirit that drew us; or perhaps the intriguing regional cuisine or the work of home-grown visionaries such as the iconic architect Gaudi. The prosaic reality is that my mum’s sister had been the year before and had had “quite a nice time”. She and my uncle were coming with us, along with my three cousins. Safety in numbers, after all.

Emboldened by the promising lack of cultural challenge and whispered-of availability of English breakfasts, we found ourselves, like it was the most natural thing in the world, at the trembling gateway to the Earth’s hidden kingdoms: Manchester Ringway Airport.

Our plane awaited. As we walked up to the gangway, my eldest cousin Mark told me to look at my watch, to make a note what time it was so I could always remember the first time I got onto a plane. “Yes,” I remember thinking. “This IS an important moment. I SHOULD remember this. It’s a fact that my inevitable biographers will need to know.”

My self importance was further buoyed by the fact that my brother and I were sat a row in front of our parents, in our eyes a development on a par with being upgraded to business class. “This is exciting, isn’t it?” said the air steward as he checked our seatbelts. “You can pretend you’re travelling all by yourselves.”

I thought he made an excellent point. At 14, I was beginning to make my own way in the world and in the absence of actual independence, this was just the sort of delusional fantasy I could easily work with.

As the plane taxied onto the runway, I cued up the song on my cassette walkman, the song that I had selected to be the soundtrack to those first airborne moments: Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now. As we hit a ground speed of what seemed like a thousand miles an hour, Freddie sang, “I’m travelling at the speed of light, I want to make a supersonic man out of you…”

Oblivious of the gay subtext, I felt a surge of euphoria. A supersonic man. That’s what I’d be. That’s what I WAS.

And so I took to the skies for the first time, thrust headlong into a world of tatty charter airline seats, the hacking backseat smoking “sections” and barely edible inflight cuisine. It all seemed…impossibly glamorous.

I stared out of the window in wonderment as Queen’s Greatest Hits continued to serenade me through the cloud cover. I felt totally alone, unhindered by the petty concerns of terra firma, unfettered by homework and rules and thoughts of the girls in my class that surely couldn’t prefer that young, stubbled street tough with the motorbike who hung around outside the school gates because he didn’t seem all that bright and was it really safe to ride around with someone on the back because they’d have to hang on really tight and…

…and then something unforeseen happened. I wasn’t sure just what was going on, but my recently assumed status as spunky young pioneer of the skyways was about to take something of a hit. My eardrums were on fire. I felt nauseous. Something was awry.

Forgoing my illusion of travelling alone, I turned, teary-eyed and panic-stricken, to my parents, just to make sure I wasn’t about to expire on my maiden flight. Cursory enquiries revealed my parents’ knowledge of aeronautical ailments to be as limited as my own, but in any case the commotion had attracted the attention of the cabin crew, and after a quick assessment, they deemed that my condition was an unfavourable reaction to the artificial pressurisation.

I don’t know if medical science in this field has progressed, but I pray for my fellow humans’ sake that the cure for this condition is now with us. The only apparent antidote in those days was for me to sit holding two glasses over my ears. Glasses that had been crammed full of cotton wool that had been soaked in boiling water.

Looking back, this seems like a measure that was created with the sole intent of amusing my fellow passengers, but I was sincerely assured that this was the way to health. All I could think was that it hardly evoked the devil-may-care adventuring of, say, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

But so it was that I spent the remainder of the flight in this hamstrung, humiliating fashion, clutching my steaming ear goblets and listening to the muffled strains of my surroundings, my inelegant debut on the stage of world travel.

Some might argue I never recovered my poise. In any case, I’d like to make it clear that at no point during this episode did I think, “Hey, maybe I can make a career out of this.”

That bit…well that bit just kind of happened…

The entries for our competition covered the full gamut of FQ bars. We're pleased to announce the following winners, who each get a copy of The French Quarter Drinking Companion:

Laura Tan (for Kingfish)
Rachel Rettinger (for The Abbey)
Kira Chung (for Molly's at the Market

Congratulations on a fine win - it's a great guide to boozing in the French Quarter (read our review HERE) , and we're very grateful to Pelican Publishing for providing us with the prizes. More competitions coming very soon.

The internet is a-buzz with talk about the internet, and some of it about how expensive it is to SEE the internet in certain hotel chains. Among the lead accusers is the champion of hotel consumers, Hotel Chatter, who publish an annual list of which hotel chains charge the most for wi-fi and why (fhy).
    This fiscal outrage is all well and good, and the more hotels that let us download illegal copies of current cinema releases, the better for everyone, n'est-ce pas? Only a layman and a communist would argue FOR hotel internet charges.
So, please step forward one Daniel Edward Craig, a hotelier of unknown repute, who puts forward a case for the daylight robbery of his long-suffering clientele. Get ready to froth at the mouth like an in-room cappucino as he, er, sets out a pretty sensible defence of the whole thing, actually. Some of the arguments are a bit, "Well, we're not as bad as airlines!" but on the whole you can kind of see his point. See what I mean HERE. Marriott can probably still go suck it, though.

Alright, we KNOW that the title is a reference to The Hobbit and the post is about Game of Thrones, but you think we've got all morning to think up strictly accurate fantasy-related travel puns? OK, we DO, but that doesn't mean we're going to.
    So we've been indisposed for a week or so, but we came back to someone sending us this Buzzfeed link.
    As if arsing around on aggregating travel sites isn't time consuming enough, Kayak are now offering the chance to spoddy dork geeks to work out the holidaying possibilities in completely fictional worlds.  Yes, if you're the kind of person who uses a 20-sided dice to make major life decisions, you can now fritter away your finite life by working out the best way to get from Westeros to King's Landing OR WHATEVER, I KNOW THEY MIGHT BE THE SAME PLACE I DON'T CARE. I hope they ARE the same place, just so it's vaguely annoying. Anyway. Your vacation from reality can take place via ships, carts and the backs of flying unicorns (probably). We take enough time trying to get cheap ACTUAL flights to indulge in this kind of thing, but if you're already imagining your and Danny's honeymoon in a dragon-themed boudoir in a castle somewhere pretend, then this search engine isn't too much of a stretch for you, we expect. Happy trails, nerds.