Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve wanted to be a rock star. I used to look at the pictures in Melody Maker of Paul Rodgers getting onto Bad Company’s personal Boeing 737 and think: “What in the name of all that’s holy will be going on in that thing after it takes off?” None of it, I suspected, would involve accountancy or mineral water.

I’d hear tales of Keith Moon fire-axeing his way into Peter Frampton’s bathroom so that he could cut old Goldilocks’s hair with a pair of garden shears. Or of Joe Walsh buying an electric chain saw so that no one would know he was coming until he arrived through their bedroom wall. Or of one notable drummer snorting cocaine off a famous guitarist’s dog. And then I’d stop daydreaming and find my careers master was still droning on about the joys of estate agency.

However, standing like a swollen river between me and my dreams was an unfortunate fact of life. I could not play a musical instrument. And when I sang, it sounded like I’d been kicked in the testicles. I realise that this never stopped the Bee Gees, but they had lovely hair by way of compensation. Mine looked like Brian May’s in a spaceship.

Last year, however, someone came up with the bright idea of making a Top Gear stage show and taking it round the world. We’d have to charter 747s for all the props. There would be roadies. Special effects. An endless parade of hotel rooms. Maybe even some groupies. It would be rock’n’roll, except I didn’t need any talent. I signed up like a shot.

And so we arrived on Waiheke Island midway through the tour. We’d done 10 sell-out shows in South Africa and narrowly avoided being fried in Australia. Next on the tour of countries we used to own would be Hong Kong, but for now we were taking a couple of days off in a rented house.

There were four guys and three girls.

There was a pool. There was a beach. There was a 65ft cruiser tied up to the jetty, a Range Rover Sport on the lawn and two helicopters in the garden. We only needed one, the Twin Squirrel, but I’d decided to act like a rock star and had insisted on my own personal Hughes 500 – the best, fastest, most agile chopper in the world.

We had, therefore, all the ingredients you need for a bit of serious rock’n’rollery, even though this was New Zealand, where, if you ask someone for drugs, you get a packet of Disprin. No matter. There was beer. There was champagne. And I’d brought my own personal cutlery made from giraffe bone.

Unfortunately, because we’d already done 20 shows, I was a bit tired. And since there were 17 more to go, I didn’t want to get too wasted, so we decided to play Risk.

We tore that house apart looking for the box – well, when I say we tore it apart, we looked carefully in all the cupboards, because we didn’t want to make a mess. But to no avail. So one of the pilots was ordered to fire up his Squirrel and go to Auckland to get it.

I’d love to say this gave me a thrill, a sense that we’d marched up to the fringes of extreme and kept right on going. But all the while, I had this horrible feeling that someone was paying for that chopper – and that it might be me.

To take my mind off the cost, we decided to see who could throw a girl the furthest down the swimming pool. I picked the lightest but sadly, on my first attempt, I felt my back go. So I left the others to it and went to bed with some class A cocoa.

The next day I was stung by a wasp. When my arm became thicker than my thigh, I decided that I was almost certainly going to die and that it was a rather hopeless way for a rock’n’roll star to go. Most career through the pearly gates on a burning motorcycle with half a gallon of heroin coursing round their arterial route map. Not from an insect sting.

I tried, as the tour thundered onwards, to act like a rock star. In Hong Kong I thought seriously about having a wee from the helipad on top of the Peninsula hotel – to see if I could finish before the first bit hit the ground. But I thought I might get into trouble.

Then, later in the day, I decided to drive a 50ft powerboat through the harbour at full tilt to see if the wash might roll over a Star ferry. But there’s an 11 knot speed limit. Which seemed sensible, so I stuck to it, vigorously.

Girls? Yes, there were loads, but when you have the British tabloids breathing down your neck, it was better, I figured, to ignore them.

On the last night we had a party. A big one. And I decided to make it through to the dawn. But I had three shows to do the next day and a long flight home in the evening. And I was pretty tired, so at two I called it a day.

And therein lies the problem. When you are 48 you just don’t have the stamina to push the outside of the envelope. And your moral compass is sufficiently well developed to keep you, and your car, out of the hotel swimming pool.

Make no mistake, I loved every minute of the whole exercise – but I would have loved it so much more if I’d been 18. So listen up, children. Forget about getting a job. There aren’t any. And forget your Facebook too. Just do your piano practice. Get good quickly – there isn’t a moment to lose.

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