Packing a bag brings me out in a sweat

Jenny Eclair's current passport carries only a handful of stamps."My passport's very dull," she says. "My dad was in the Army and if you are born an Army child you are fed up with travelling by the time you are eight. I have no travel bug whatsoever. Packing a bag brings me out in a sweat."

She claims her allergy to foreign parts was exacerbated with the birth of her daughter Phoebe in 1989. She explains: "Holidays change when you have kids, you suddenly have to be sensible and you can't go places where they are going to be eaten whole by a snake. The first time my boyfriend Geoff and I took Phoebe abroad, we went to Tuscany. We've got some wonderful friends who are better off than us and very generous. They invited us to stay in this palace in Lucca with them. My child was crawling and still had very soft fontanelle and the iron bed we slept in had metal spikes that plunged down - so the whole thing was fraught with danger all the time!"

The 1991 stamp for Turkey reminds Jenny of another holiday she took with Geoff and Phoebe. "What they didn't tell us was that after you arrive at the airport it's 14 hours on a coach to some crappy resort with a leaking baby and one nappy!" To make matters worse, the weather was bad, and Jenny admits that Geoff bore the brunt of her disappointment. She explains: "When I go on holiday I expect things to be absolutely perfect and I blame Geoff if they're not. As soon as a cloud blocks my view, I go 'Geoff, there's a cloud' and expect him to do something about it. Obviously, he tries ..." Another problem Jenny has when she travels is with food. She says: "I've got weight problems, so I just have to say no all the time. I am very dull and only eat sandwiches anyway, and I get panicky if I can't get low calorie mayonnaise - in fact I usually take my own jar."

The last stamp in Jenny's passport is for Antigua in 1996. Having won the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival the year before, she decided to spend the pounds 3,000 prize on a holiday. Jenny was delighted to find that they were on the same place as the Princess of Wales who was on her way to Barbuda. She says: "It knocked 40 minutes off the flight time, because if there are royals on board you don't have to circle round the airport." The only thing was, Phoebe wasn't allowed in the cockpit because the young Princes were in there. "But," jokes Jenny, "it was a good job, because both of them had a royal case of head lice!"

Rosanna Greenstreet

Jenny Eclair is currently appearing in 'Steaming' at the Piccadilly Theatre.