THE HOME Office - never to be confused with the Away Department - has announced that Britlanders leaving for the Republic of Ireland will be exempt from new passport checks.

These are designed to improve government understanding of who's leaving the UK, not so they can mark them down as rotters, but to help keep tabs on known criminals and suspected terrorists.

I can help the Government here. Not only am I not a known criminal. Not only am I not a suspected terrorist. But I never leave the country. In this, as in many other ways, I am a model citizen.

My 10-year passport expires in a fortnight and I won't be renewing it. Whatever it costs, I can't afford it, and it never gets used anyway.

Ireland was the last place I visited, as it happens, because I find the climate equable and the walking style not too slovenly. That was seven years ago.

I've never been abroad since, though I sometimes take trips on Google Maps to towns in Norway, just picking them at random to see if they'll be pretty and clean. They always are.

For my lack of money, it is better to travel virtually than to arrive. Or, if I might flit lightly from Stevenson to Kipling: he travels fastest who travels online.

Ultimately, the best solution would be to have a Star Trek holo-deck recreating places artificially. That way, never mind a passport, you wouldn't need a suitcase.

Nor would you be forced into having intercourse, if that's the word for which I'm groping, with the local Earthlings. Twenty-one years after it happened, I remain traumatised by an encounter in a Norwegian gift-shop.

I made my purchase and the assistant didn't say thank you. Even now, I have to force myself to take deep breaths and repeat rhythmically the word "calm".

At the time, I didn't know that, in Scandinavia generally, it's considered rude to be polite. In addition, striking up a conversation with a stranger at a bus stop, or saying hello to a neighbour, can lead to a lengthy prison sentence and your name being put on a register of "threats to public grimness".

The Czech Republic was similar. There, mine host, instead of providing proper accommodation, had crudely forged a pass for a room in a university hall of residence. Every day, I'd to pass a scowling, snowman-shaped woman at a desk who asked for proof of my "existence".

As a former philosophy student at a top technical college, this flustered me. I didn't enjoy the Czech countryside either, particularly the dark villages where the houses had barbed wire fences instead of hedges and fierce dogs in lieu of wind chimes.

Holland had fierce bicycles. It was the first country I visited. Surprisingly unemployed after graduating (see above), I borrowed a substantial sum to join a friend who said there were vacancies canning beans in a factory. After two train journeys, a ferry across the North Sea, a long hike and a bicycle trip, I knocked on the manager's door and said: "Are there any jobs?" And he said: "No."

I visited the country again for the last day of the Lockerbie trial. Accommodation was sparse, and I'd to share a hotel bridal suite with a female colleague. Fearing for my virtue, I never slept a wink. Expressing wind was also awkward.

But it hasn't all been bad. I found the ratepayers of rural France friendly, except for a moustachioed barber who shouted at me when my car broke down.

I also quite liked America, but not New York, where people were a trifle brusque. In Washington, I got sunburned in April and received neither compensation nor counselling.

Abroadshire, then, is a mixed bag. But, by and large, I'm with the punk poet John Cooper Clark's character who said: "I've seen the world. I didn't like it."

It's not as if I regard my own country as better. Hell, no. Scotland? You're having a laugh. In many respects, particularly self-respect, it is worse. But it's the semi-devolved devil I know. And you don't have to look far for a Greggs.

I look at the photo on my 10-year-old passport and see bewildered innocence. Since then, staying at home has broadened my horizons, and any new photo would feature a stronger expression that said to the world: "I'm not going anywhere." Just like they told me at school.