The creators of the Lonely Planet and Rough Guides have confessed to a late access of guilt over having sold so many books over the decades encouraging people to travel. It turns out that all the travelling has poisoned the lonely planet, and they urge us now, instead of signing up for an impulsive few days in a packed Prague, or a fortnight on some sun-kissed, poverty-stricken island, to stay put. Or at least reconsider the benefits of a Network Rail away-break to the Welsh valleys. Peacehaven, which is just up the road from me in Sussex, looks tempting. There's a rattling gale off the Channel just at the minute, but there's plenty of free parking, and anyway, do you want package-tour comforts or do you want reality?

It isn't just selfish holidaymakers who've wrecked the environment of course. There's all that unnecessary business and diplomatic travel too. You do have to wonder why Condi Rice needs to be conducted personally around the cultural entrepot of Blackburn by Jack Straw, when she must surely be able to get the general idea from an online satellite camera somewhere. I myself must have assisted in wiping out a fair few species through undertaking press trips on a virtually monthly basis in the early stages of my career. What was the point of another five-day jaunt round the Languedoc? And the company was mostly Sartrean in its hellishness anyway. It's mostly leisure travel, though, that eats up all the aviation fuel, and carelessly belches its combustion all over the globe.

What should make it really easy not to go anywhere, however, is the thought of never having to get on a plane again. I've become a nervous flyer over the years, not in the sense of having a pussy-assed panic attack at the thought of being so high up with nothing holding you up omiGOD!, but at the hideous treatment doled out to you throughout - from arrival at the mile-long, slowly shuffling check-in queue to the moment of your disgorgement on foreign soil and the start of that long, long wait for your battered baggage to be restored to you. No airline in the world is fit to travel on in Economy Class, owing to the lack of room, the lack of air, the lack of anything worth doing, and the appalling knowledge that, elsewhere on the craft, people are being treated to a seat for each buttock, cashew nuts that have been personally warmed by the captain, and as much Dom Perignon as they can just about hold down before you all enter that all-important period of turbulence.

The era of 99p flights did not bring air travel within the ambit of ordinary people. It was there already. What it did was make flying somewhere seem less of an adventure, and more like something you'd do on a silly little weekend whim. This is a double deception. Firstly, it encouraged everyone to forget about air pollution, environmental despoliation and the insanity of the global oil market. But secondly, it made us all blind to the privations involved in the worst method of transport ever invented.

Wherever you are, stretch out. Walk about. Put your own music on, instead of having to listen to an all-star Beatles tribute. Watch a cool DVD, instead of some crappy thriller with Bruce Willis in it. Open a 75cl bottle of wine, instead of having to fumble in your pocket while seated for a fistful of euros for a three-mouthful mini-bottle served warm from a trolley by a supercilious gay android who already thinks you ought to be restrained. Smile. You're not on a plane.

But then, hey, neither are those poor saps sitting at Heathrow, waiting for further news on the delayed 04.50 Zoo Airlines flight to Magaluf.

'Professor Longjohn leaned back meditatively in his familiar leather chair. What he had just read was going to take some digesting. With that instinctive, unconscious movement that had stayed with him since his university days, he put a hand to his face and clutched his cheeks in thought. He pinched the greying whiskers beneath his lower lip. His skin retained a pliant freshness uncommon in a man of fifty, and his eyes had lost none of their darting hazel lustre. He rather prided himself on not having lost much of his hair, while others in the faculty twenty years his junior already had the prematurely glabrous sheen of the cloistered academic. They, though, would be confronted this morning with nothing more contentious than a new research paper on some minor eighteenth-century aristocrat's penchant for occult religion. Longjohn was in another league. He was being led to nothing less than a meeting with a man who claimed to be descended from Jesus Christ. With an effortlessly commanding gesture, he picked up the phone.'

The great mystery in the ongoing publicity being given to the Holy Mother of all religious conspiracy theories - did Jesus marry Mary Magdalen, have a bunch of kids with her, and then come and settle in the Home Counties? (er, No, No and No) - is not whether the Roman Catholic church has covered up the truth of this matter over two millennia. It's more why anybody can bear to read several hundred pages of prose resembling the above. Agatha Christie, thou should'st be living at this hour.

I have no idea how the plagiarism suit, now under way in London, against Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, will turn out. I rather hope it fails, since its success would reorient the definition of intellectual copyright in an alarmingly naive way. Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent, authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, on which vital work Brown has drawn with what he regards as due acknowledgement, are motivated, I am quite sure, only by the wish to see their own diligent researches accorded due protection, and not at all by the prospect of getting a light dusting from the avalanche of cash that Brown has been showered with since his novel became required reading throughout the whole of Christendom. However that may be, at least their book was honest-to-goodness, eminently readable airport pap, if you took it the right way. Dan Brown's effort thinks it's a literary novel - greying whiskers and all.