US Edition Needless to say it remained just that, a dream, and my first venture off the British mainland was to the Isle of Wight. And very adventurous it seemed at the time, too.
It was only last weekend that I discovered that you don't have to travel as far afield as the Pacific to experience a millionaires' playground. All you have to do is go to Ireland.
In truth, I'm still reeling from shock – as is my bank account – at the cost of everything in the aptly nicknamed Emerald Isle. I'm not mean with money (I have even been known to buy the first round) but my friends and I had to agree within two hours of arriving in Dublin to avoid mentally converting the euro into sterling.
Let me tell you why. For our first glass of the day, we went to a modest hotel near Dublin, where the leather sofas looked and smelled like they had come from the set of Rising Damp. We were all aware that sterling has plummeted to its lowest level against the euro, so we ordered a bottle of house white. The taste was rendered even more toxic by the price: 23 euros, or £23. The paracetamol to cure the resulting headache cost another eight euros.
We moved on to a town called Castleblaney in County Monaghan. The streets and shops were deserted and, astonishingly, so were the bars. We were in Ireland, for goodness sake! We were the only customers in the discount supermarket (we had hatched a cunning plot to fill our hip flasks) in the middle of Saturday afternoon. "They're across the border," groaned the bored cashier. "Everyone goes shopping in the north because of the euro."
We heard the same story wherever we went. In Castleblaney's Chinese restaurant – again, empty apart from us – the poor waitress looked distraught when we declined starters and a second portion of rice, and said no to dessert. We were then treated to yet another long and unsolicited rant about the "------- euro".
Ireland's loss is Northern Ireland's gain. The locals drive 30 minutes to Newry, on British soil, where
the supermarkets and restaurants are doing a roaring trade thanks to the Celtic invasion.
It's easy to see why. One Irish chamber of trade survey estimated a 49 per cent difference in the same shopping basket of goods between north and south. A litre of Jameson Irish whiskey costs the equivalent of 20 euros in Newry and 38 euros in Dublin, the city where it's distilled.
And, if you want to avoid the now daily traffic jams in the stampede to cross the border, courier companies are taking orders for everything from car tyres to toothpaste to new sofas. They delivered to us, too, which explains the severity of the hangovers on our return to England. I told my friends we should not have ordered two bottles of Jameson's… or was it three?
Doing a recording the other day in the House of Lords, for Radio 4's The Long View, I met the impressive 12th Earl of Portland. He is an actor who sounds very familiar. He read his lines with great bravado. Lord Portland is known to his friends as Tim Bentinck, but to the rest of us as David Archer from Ambridge. Believe me, I tried hard not to. But I could not help myself. "So David," I said, "how's Ruth?"
Two years ago, almost to the day, I saw David Cameron present a Variety Club wheelchair to a lovely little boy called Barnaby Lister. Barnaby, aged eight, was thrilled. "I can do wheelies in it and basketball now,'' he declared. Cameron, who had insisted in advance on no publicity, was deeply moved. We all were. Barnaby, you see, had cerebral palsy.