I’ve been responsible over the years for more than enough of what’s known as luxury lifestyle journalism, so I know the deal. You don’t bite the hand. And, as such, I’m not going to criticise Angela Giuffrida for what might seem to be an unduly gushing write-up of the relaunched Orient Express service between Sicily and Rome. I do wonder, though, whether anyone prepared to spend upward of €11,000 on a nostalgic trundle aboard said train will need to have it explained to them who Poirot is, the relevant book in which he appears, or who wrote it.

PS: And on the Today programme this morning (Wed 27), we had it explained to us what the Holocaust was.

PPS: And there’s more, there’s always more. Apparently there are people who don’t know what punk rock was.

From the Instagram account (of all things) of The Face magazine (ditto), a piece that affects to investigate the phenomenon of Gen Z and younger millennials going on cruises. And among the factors they apparently appreciate is the fact that a cruise offers “a way to have everything from your day-to-day life replicated”.

So what the younglings really want from these cruises is a simulacrum of normality, but on a big boat. Damn, I’m so old, I remember when the whole point of a holiday to leave everything from your day-to-day life at home.

PS: They’ve deleted it now.

When Kindles and other e-readers first appeared, with the promise for travellers in particular that a whole library would occupy less space and weight in your luggage than a slim paperback, I did wonder whether the new form might have missed a significant consideration when it comes to reading in public: specifically, the act of letting other people see what you’re reading. Like the music you listen to, or the clothes you wear, or the flavour of crisps you eat, it’s part of the persona you present to the world. The latest Murakami, or a Richard Osman rip-off? Unfair as it is, people will make assumptions.

And then I saw this:

(Note: Small Boo had these thoughts, not me. But she hasn’t got a blog, at least not that I know of.)

There’s an idea knocking about in the tech world called the singularity. Essentially, it’s the point at which artificial intelligence transcends human cognition, where machines become cleverer than brains. It’s long been assumed that the singularity, if it happens, will be a case of machines playing catch-up, of AI’s thinking power developing faster than that of homo sapiens. 

But then a news story broke a few days ago, about the budget airline RyanAir seeking to identify people travelling with fake South African passports by setting them a general knowledge test in Afrikaans. This has inevitably caused great offence as Afrikaans is still seen by many South Africans as the hated language of apartheid; but aside from the PR blooper, it’s a pretty pointless exercise, since only 13% of citizens speak the language – Zulu and Xhosa are more widespread. Add the fact that the questions on the test are littered with grammatical errors and it really looks as if some junior RyanAir apparatchik ran them through Google translate, operating on a vague memory that it’s one of the languages that they speak down there.

And the thought presents itself – could the singularity arrive as a result of AI standing still, while humanity’s intelligence declines to meet it?

A few months ago, I unearthed my first passport. It was the long-defunct British Visitors version, acquired at the age of 13 to enable me to go on a school trip to France, during which I would have my first snog, but that’s another tale for another day, or maybe never. A BVP was only valid for a year and allowed entry to a strictly limited array of countries, most of them in Western Europe; you could go to West Berlin, but only by air. Any other mode of transport would involve setting foot on Communist soil.

Which inevitably got me thinking about how much Europe, and travel, and life have changed in the years since; and how much some people apparently wish they hadn’t. Apparently we’re all going to get dark blue passports again, something apparently greatly to be desired by many Brexit voters, along with smoking in pubs, incandescent lightbulbs, pre-decimal currency and the death penalty (we are not informed whether this will be carried out in public). It all rather supports my gut feeling that Brexit is less about leaving the EU, more about going back to an imagined yesterday of Morris Minors and outside toilets, where everything is grey or beige, except the people, who are exclusively white.

But back to the passports. It’s well documented that there were some clear correlations between voting in the referendum with regard to age (older people voted to leave, younger to stay) and educational background (the higher up the learning ladder you went, the more likely you were to be a remainer). But another interesting statistic shows areas that voted heavily for Brexit also had the lowest levels of passport ownership. Which suggests that for many people, the desire for a blue passport is yet another abstract yearning for something that doesn’t really exist.

1. It’s about 239 people.
2. It’s about an aeroplane.
3. It’s about mystery.
4. It’s about absence.
5. It’s about the families and friends.
6. It’s about the several meanings of “missing”.
7. It’s about the pilot.
8. And then it isn’t.
9. It’s about Anwar Ibrahim.
10. It’s about blondes in the cockpit.
11. It’s about the point at which the certainty of grief would be better than the ignorance of hope.
12. It’s about corridors.
13. It’s about Schrödinger’s cat.
14. It’s about 9/11 but, seriously, what isn’t?
15. It’s about China. Ditto.
16. It’s about too many disaster movies.
17. It’s about pings.
18. It’s about being told to pray.
19. It’s about the sneaking suspicion that the much-vaunted transition to the so-called Asian Century may involve more than a few mis-steps along the way.
20. It’s about stolen passports.
21. It’s about –stans.
22. It’s about conspiracy theories.
23. It’s about the Zionists.
24. It’s about the Illuminati.
25. It’s about electric cars.
26. It’s about the point at which Buzzfeed does a “What sort of MH370 conspiracy theory are you?” type of thing.
27. Or maybe there’s a Hitler parody.
28. It’s about cockups.
29. It’s about the internet.
30. It’s about how 24-hour news has to be filled with something, anything, even if it’s nothing.
31. Especially if it’s nothing, because that’s cheaper and easier.
32. It’s about sharks, circling, jumping.
33. It’s about wondering how this story would be turning out if more than three Americans had been on board.
34. It’s about press conferences.
35. It’s about The Rapture.
36. It’s about the Marie Celeste.
37. It’s about Lost.
38. It’s about Glenn Miller.
39. It’s about how quickly we forget Ukraine. And Oscar Pistorius.
40. And Syria. 
41. And whatever it was we were concerned about before Syria. I forget. Edward Snowden? Phone hacking? 
42. Dave Lee Travis?
43. It’s about 4’ 33” by John Cage.
44. It’s about Smile by the Beach Boys, or at least Smile as it existed in our imaginations, at the point where multiple different bootlegs intersected, before they actually released the real album and all the fun went out.
45. It’s about Google Maps.
46. It’s about people who are suddenly experts on aviation.
47. It’s about Chris Goodfellow and his startlingly simple theory.
48. It’s about Rupert Murdoch.
49. It’s about Courtney Love.
50. It’s not about you.
51. It’s about _____________

Inside, the flesh is marmoreally slimy, some say silky. Personally, I think it’s like lost babies who have been drowned in baths of whey. The flesh clings to the stones like putrefying muscle. You have to suck and nibble. Few Westerners manage that twice... It defies categorisation and nothing so marks the yawning gulf between hot East and cool West as this strange, misbegotten Caliban food – a vegetable that thinks it’s a cadaver.

Every year I succumb to the same bout of irrational anxiety at the supreme wrongness of the decisions taken – even the decisions that have yet to be taken – by the Academy, and now is no exception. How could anybody, I rant like a student, watch both Avatar and The Hurt Locker and come out of the experience thinking that Avatar is better? Surely this a distinction that leaps beyond mere opinion, and becomes an objective fact? Informed word (well, what Mark Kermode reckons) is that Cameron's pretty-yet-elephantine parable of ecology and colonialism and stuff is due for the top Oscar, although Kathryn Bigelow will be the first laydee to get the Director gong.

What’s odder still is that the standard medium through which studios plug their products to potential voters is still the DVD, which should in theory put Avatar at a disadvantage. It’s a film that screams for scope and grandeur, which is one of the reasons it left me a bit cold; it’s as if Cameron looked at the technology first, the 3D and the CGI and the IMAX, and then made a film to fit. Anything other than a six-storey screen will diminish its blue-hued grandeur. Whereas The Hurt Locker, although I’m sure there’s plenty of clever technical stuff going on there, benefits from its very modesty. It’s a war film, but a modern one, about bombs and snipers and skirmishes and damaged men, rather than swarms of extras sweeping over the plains.

In fact, only last night I saw The Hurt Locker in its ideal environment; in a crowded minibus, on a dodgy disc picked up for 20 baht (about 40p) on the Thailand-Laos border. The claustrophobia, heat and bumpy roads all added to the deliciously uneasy atmosphere; as did the policeman who flagged us down, told us all to get off the bus, looked grumpy for about five minutes and then let us carry on.

The English subtitles made the whole thing weirder yet. Rather than being transcribed from the original soundtrack (a practice that has its own drawbacks, as one might imagine), these seemed to be the result of transcribing the Thai soundtrack and then feeding the resulting text through some kind of translation engine. And inevitably we couldn’t turn the bloody things off.

Highlights: the protagonist’s name being rendered as “vegetarian food”; all expletives, of which there are many, becoming “mad hey!”; and the regular on-screen reminder of how many days the grunts have left in Iraq (which surely didn’t need to be translated into English text in the first place, since they’re up there in English even in the Thai version) morphing into “intractable fungus budget”.

PS: Ah. Recent events have conspired to make the above post rather redundant. Just ignore me, I would.

I’ve been topping up my karmic footprint in the past few days, indulging in what Alan Whicker would have dubbed a jet-set lifestyle. And as the recycled, H1N1-drenched air slowly poisoned my brain, a few thoughts seeped through:

1.) I simply don’t comprehend the prevailing neurosis about unflattering passport photos. Surely it’s the flattering ones that should cause the most distress? My own picture dates from 2004, a point at which I could muster respectably pointy cheekbones and enough hair to concoct a pompadour that might offer Little Richard a run for his money. In fact, I look pretty cute in it, if I say so myself. As a result, whenever I present it at immigration, the polyester-swathed lackey’s eyes brim with pity, as if to say “You poor sod, what ungodly trauma blighted your once-carefree life over the past five years?”

2.) Talking of those grounded denizens of the airport, why do they insist on saying “Have a nice flight”? My tongue-jerk reaction is to say “You too”, which rather rubs in the fact that I’m about to fly off somewhere potentially interesting, while they’re just going to spend the next six hours looking at passports, checking in luggage, selling bottles of duty-free Scotch and the like. Must stop doing it.

3.) I understand that, when it comes to picking in-flight entertainment, airlines tend to avoid movies that include scenes of air crashes, hostage situations and the like. Surely it would also be tactful to avoid exposing economy-class travellers to films such as Julie and Julia, which is essentially about the joy to be had from the preparation and consumption of delicious food. I mean, that’s just cruel.

4.) Between flights, my sleep cycle is inevitably buggered up. I find myself leaping fully awake at about 4 in the morning, then crashing out again shortly after lunch. All well and good, except that this would only make sense if I’d been flying from Trinidad, or possibly Tasmania. Which I wasn’t. Jet lag I can deal with, but I’ve never before suffered from someone else’s jet lag.

On Saturday I shall be embarking upon a longish plane journey, and just in case a combination of Kate Hudson movies, articles about luxury watches and scented towelettes doesn’t sustain me, I’m thinking of taking a couple of books. But what to pluck from the pile? Any suggestions gratefully received.

Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
“A wildly original novel of erotic fulfillment and spiritual yearning.”

Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker
“...an extraordinary feat of imagination and of style funny, terrible, haunting and unsettling, this book is a masterpiece.”

Will Self, The Book of Dave
“Will Self is such an overpowering presence in his own books that it’s sometimes difficult to tell what he's actually written.”

Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills
“If you need all mysteries to be solved and all plotlines to be resolved, this book will frustrate you to no end.”

Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World
“This is a book not about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else.”

Charlotte Roche, Wetlands
“It's a famous woman talking about vaginas – of course it’s going to sell.”

...that's little more than a collection of links I couldn't be bothered to work up into anything more coherent, plus a particularly silly YouTube clip.

1. According to the BBC, my favourite breakfast haunt in the known universe, Tsukiji fish market, is restricting access to tourists because they're getting in the way of the traders. Spokesman Ihei Sugita says that visitors like to photograph fish that come from their own home countries.

2. In The Times, Mark Edwards investigates the cultural chasm between music critics and the poor bastards who actually have to buy music: "Go up to each person in turn and ask them to name their favourite Beatles track. The music journalist is the one who chooses Tomorrow Never Knows... It’s the law. If they choose Penny Lane or Let It Be, they’ll be drummed out of the union."

3. And thanks to the New Yorker, which alerts us to the news that film producer Bryan Grazer is looking for a personal cultural attaché: "Grazer may ask you to read any book he’s interested in."

4. Oh yeah....

A day off, it being the 80th birthday of the world's hippest monarch. Small Boo and I decided to take a trip to Pattaya: I've skirted the edges of the resort a few times, but never actually been there. It's actually a fairly grim, tacky place, somewhere in the psychic space between Blackpool and Benidorm, but with rather more tattooed, chain-smoking Eastern Europeans in evidence. Still, one more to tick off the list.

The fun came on the way home. First, we stopped at Mini-Siam, a model village in the grand tradition, with representations not just of Thailand's finest architecture, but many of the world's finest tourist attractions. It's actually pretty good, although the right-most head on Mount Rushmore is more Leonard Nimoy than Abraham Lincoln.

It's a fun detour if you're passing, and there were plenty of local family groups enjoying the holiday. What surprised me was the presence of three vast coaches full of Korean tourists, who were lapping the place up with as much relish as the Thai kids. It did make me wonder whether we've got this tourism business right: maybe its enough to stick models of the Parthenon, Sydney Opera House, Angkor Wat and so on in one venue, and let the punters run free with their cameras. I mean, when they photographed each other in front of an impressive copy of Abu Simbel, they could have been imagining themselves in Egypt, or the Las Vegas version of Egypt? And which would more impress the folks back in Seoul? (Which reminds me, I really want to go to Macao, to see their version of the Vegas version of Venice.)

Obligatory obeisance to Baudrillard duly performed, we proceeded to The Bottle Art Museum, the life's work of the late Pieter Bij De Leij.

The oeuvre of Dutch-born De Leij falls squarely into what art critics with interesting haircuts now call "outsider art". He made rather rough and ready representations of buildings and vehicles, then dismantled them, and put them back together inside bottles. It's what people have been doing with model ships for centuries, but rather more fiddly. The slightly melancholy atmosphere in the little museum tipped over into David Lynch territory when we reached the back wall, only to see pictorial representations of De Leij's six weddings, revealing that he was a dwarf.

The final stop was an orchid farm, but we were stopped in our tracks by a gesticulating man who warned that a randy, rather violent elephant was blocking the road, and if we carried on we'd probably be making a very interesting claim on the car insurance. We took an alternative route, and from the farm we had a good view of the beast being tranquilised, which made me feel a bit Orwellian, albeit in a terribly safe, sterile way.

"It's nearly four," said the orchid man. "The Russians will be here soon." On cue, seven or eight all-terrain vehicles, most of them ridden by burly men in shorts, crash helmets, vicious sunburns and nothing else, rolled up, had a quick drink, and departed. "Tour party," explained our host.

Small Boo selected an orchid cluster, and stowed it in the boot. On the freeway back to Bangkok she glanced at the car ceiling and gasped. It was swarming with large, black ants, which had presumably hitched a ride along with the flowers, and spent the rest of the journey wandering harmlessly over our heads and arms.

"How shall I end this?" I asked her, as she lounged on the bed, tapping into her laptop. She shrugged.

A few unattached thoughts about recent travels:

One: Why is it that, for some people, a visit to some site of natural or manmade beauty is incomplete without a photograph: moreover, one that includes the photographer's travelling companion gurning like a moron in front of said site, usually masking the best bit. And this isn't a sarky dig at Japanese people: they do take lots of snaps, but execute them with searing speed and efficiency, so that an entire coach party from Kyoto can aim, shoot and move on in the time it takes for a retired estate agent from Rotterdam to reposition his wife, fiddle with his exposure and wonder whether now would be a good time to try out that pristine tripod.

Two: Am I alone in finding it rather charming (albeit very arrogant) that French people are the only travellers who do not presume that strangers have English as a default language? "Bonjour!" they all chirruped as we met on the path to the weird underwater carvings of Kbal Spean.

Three: Back in Bangkok, there's a delightful French restaurant called Le Bouchon, nestled amidst the deepest, dankest fleshpots of Patpong. The highlight of the pudding menu is vanilla surprise; the surprise supposedly being the massive slug of whisky that the chef adds to the ice cream. In reality, the surprise comes when my mother, about 20 minutes after consuming said delight, staggers into O'Reilly's Bar and starts boogying to the Beatles cover band, wielding her plaster-encased right arm with gay and dangerous abandon.

Back from our second trip this year to Cambodia, again to Siem Reap, home of the wondrous weirdness that is the temples of Angkor. I had a brief "aaah-this-is-the-life" moment, thinking how delightful it would be to spend my life strolling between ABC stout at The Warehouse and palm wine at the Grand Cafe, with occasional detours to the neo-apocalyptic landscape that is Ta Phrom, a place that adds new levels of meaning to the phrase 'urban jungle'.

But of course that would be Ta Phrom without hordes of doughy Austrian tourists; and Siem Reap without the aching poverty. And I realised what I really want is an amalgam of places: not just Ta Phrom, but the best chunks of Barcelona and Hong Kong, leading onto the more interesting sidestreets of New York and Edinburgh and Tokyo and Montreal and Rhodes; with Niagara Falls and the North York Moors and the Pyramids a gentle stroll away. And a really good Lebanese restaurant and about 143 fabulous bookshops and record shops and a branch of Muji as well. And free wi-fi, of course.

Which leads, I suppose, to a task for the weekend, or maybe a meme, or whatever. What would be your ideal location, concocted from all the fun bits of places you've visited, or even places you haven't? And don't worry that you're leaving out the bad bits. Think of it as a conceptual bespoke travel agent, with metaphysical overtones. Or something.

Normal service will resume next week, probably with a pompous rant about Japanese books and French films and Canadian pop music and stuff.

Just returned from a relaxing long weekend with parentals in Hua Hin, holiday resort by appointment to the Thai royal family, and many lumpy Scandinavians in inappropriately skimpy swimsuits. Highlights: excellent seafood restaurant; cool waterfalls; the temporary loss of my mother's undergarments in the hotel pool, gamely retrieved by father (how they ended up there is a mystery that may never be fathomed); the vain search for the world's largest stone frog (well, that's what it said on the sign); and, best of all, watching two bright cerise dragonflies duelling like a pair of Regency bucks, at least one of them played by Stewart Granger.

On to Cambodia tomorrow. Update upon return, end-of-the-week-ish.

In which I pretend to identify the socio-economic discrimination that underlies all forms of censorship, but really I'm just taking the piss out of Ben Affleck.

And, hey, guess what: I got a postcard today. That's right, not an e-mail or a post on a holiday blog, but a proper bit of carboard with a photo of a San Francisco cable car, and a purple-inked message (slightly defaced by over-enthusiastic postmarking) from my parents telling me about their Maupin stalking (although by now they're a few steps further on their round-the-world shenanigans, probably here). Every time I receive an example of this superannuated mode of communication, I wonder whether it's the last.

Also, this just in from the Graun:

"Ofsted inspectors found 49% of secondaries were rated no better than 'satisfactory', which is no longer deemed good enough."

And I thought exams were getting easier to pass...