PASSPORT: JUDI SPIERS: I walked naked through the hotel corridor with two cushions for cover

JUDI SPIERS loves travelling but can't understand why everything always goes wrong.

"If someone asks you to travel with me, my advice would be, don't", she says. "I lose tickets, luggage, money. It's one thing after another.

"For example I once went to Lourdes with a group of disabled people, and got smallpox fever from the jab. I had disabled people sitting up all night mopping my brow.

"And when I went to Israel I made the mistake of joking around with the airline officials before boarding. They asked me if I had any relatives in Israel and because I'm Jewish, I just said: 'Oh you know, Abraham, Moses, Noah,' and so they took me into a little room and interrogated me for an hour.

"That was nothing compared to Tunisia where I got 34 sandfly bites. My doctor counted them when I got home. My arms had swollen up to double their normal size.

"In Boston I went up in a barrage balloon, only for a light-aircraft to crash into the ground beneath us. We were stuck up there for hours, unable to come down. In Paris I did my leg in during a bout of leg-wrestling and in Ibiza I blacked the hotel for three hours by sticking my Teasmaid prong into the wrong socket."

"When I went to the James Bond Festival in Jamaica it turned out that my Swiss army knife was the only corkscrew in the whole party. Jaws, Ursula Andress, Grace Jones and all the rest of them were there, and I saved the day. Which goes to show how useful those things can be.

"And my honeymoon! In Bermuda where I ran away to marry, my husband was so jet-lagged that in the middle of the marriage-service he just said: 'I don't know where I am. I can't carry on.' Luckily it wasn't so serious that I couldn't bring him round with a quick slap."

She never loses her sense of humour then?

"Yes I do, on long-haul flights. When I went to Australia I completely lost it. You're having steak and chips for breakfast, then you're in Bombay, then you get off, then they spray the plane, then you get on, then you're in Bangkok. I'll never do that again.

"In fact flying generally drives me up the wall. I once got delayed at Miami airport and ended up sharing a hotel room with a strange man in a dodgy part of town."

A man?

"Well it was either him or a woman who had gone hysterical. I chose the man. We haven't kept in touch."

And for her most recent holiday disaster?

"Only last week in Scotland I inadvertently locked myself into the lounge part of my hotel suite completely naked. To get back to my bedroom I had to walk into the corridor and through the front door. I covered myself with two cushions but I'd never have worn those colours.

"Never mind. Next week I'm going down to Cornwall to do some filming: that's my own stamping ground so it should be fine. I'll take my Swiss army knife just in case anything goes wrong."

Judi Spiers is a presenter on BBC Radio 2. She also presents 'Travel Live' for the Travel Channel.