January 17th 2005

I am a total snowboarding fanatic. My last three holidays were all snowboarding in Méribel, at the beginning of this year. Ideally I'd like to go for two or three weeks, but what with work and family, I can't do that.

Instead, I go several times for three or four days. I first skied when I was 15, and very fat. To be honest, I didn't enjoy it that much, as I was constantly falling over. When you've got a huge arse, it's difficult to get up.

By the time I went again, a year or so later, I wasn't fat any more, and didn't fall over so much. I was hooked. Normally, I'm quite lazy, and don't have much physical activity in my life, but put me in a ski resort and I become the slope Nazi - up at 8am every morning, ready for the first lift and going and going until the last.

In summer, we go fairly regularly to Canada, which I think is one of the most underrated places in the world. I'm loath to say too much on the subject, in case everyone starts going there; suffice to say it's like America without the Americans, if you can imagine such a joyful place.

We usually spend a few days in Toronto, then head up to stay in the Muskoka lake district, in northern Ontario. The area is the size of a small European country, and there are more than 1,600 lakes scattered around pine and maple forests. I realise I'm making myself sound like Sport Billy, and I'm not, but I do spend most of the holidays there wakeboarding, which is basically surfing behind a boat. Doing that on a glass-flat lake, surrounded by spectacular scenery, is just incredible.

My ideal holiday involves lots of friends and family coming and going and staying. When I was in my twenties, we used to go to Mallorca a lot. We'd rent a villa on the southwest corner, between Magaluf and Andratx. More or less anyone we'd run into over the winter would be invited, and we'd spend days swimming and water-skiing, and nights dancing and clubbing. Mallorca finally seems to have cast off its shabby lager-lout image, thanks to Mrs Michael Douglas, but I've always found it a wonderful place.

Having said that I like to be surrounded by hordes of friends and family, Sophie and I do try to slip off on our own occasionally. We spent our honeymoon in Mauritius, at the Paradise Cove Hotel. The diving was amazing. Sophie prefers to snorkel, so she would swim along the surface and wave down at me.

People who have listened to my Giles Wemmbley-Hogg series are sometimes surprised to discover that I am he. I spent a great deal of my gap year in his shoes, travelling round Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. I actually went out to meet a girlfriend, but she dumped me as soon as I arrived, so I bought a bicycle and decided to cycle the whole length of Malaysia instead. The most arduous part of the journey was cycling up into the Cameron Highlands, which are more than 5,000ft above sea level, but I kept myself going with the knowledge that on the way back, it would all be downhill, and I could just sit back and take in the views. As it happened, the bike seized up at the top and I ended up having to pedal extremely hard just to make the thing budge.

By the time I arrived in the Cameron Highlands, I had fallen off several times and been into the woods to have a drink from a stream, which I fell into. I was grazed, filthy, covered in leeches and out of breath, causing the locals to think I'd been attacked.

I passed my bicycle onto someone I met in Kuala Lumpur, and it fell apart almost immediately, so in Singapore I bought myself a pair of in-line skates, which, coupled with horrendous bus journeys, became my mode of transport through Indonesia. Skates are a fantastic way to see cities, and I swished around Jakarta and Yogyakarta, attracting strange looks along the way.

There is still a little bit of the gap year in me, busting to get out and spend time in an ashram in India - which is top of my list of places I've never been, but must get to - or scooting round China, where I have been, but only for a few days. I was in Shanghai and Beijing, where I could have spent days exploring the hidden city.

I particularly love the way that China doesn't bend to English speakers at all. Even if you know the Chinese word for water, you won't get a glass unless you pronounce it absolutely right. In Beijing, I realised I was no longer in the abroad of miming and talking louder and more slowly, but in real, proper abroad, and that's an abroad I'd like to see more of.