I love going on holidays where you don’t feel you have to make anything of the days. That’s what I find relaxing. The best trips I’ve had have been to France with Robert Webb and other friends from university.

We go to the Dordogne for a week, hire a house and just spend the time playing table tennis, swimming or sitting in the shade with a hat on, with a good book and a beer - just pissing the days away, really.

I think, in general, there are two types of people: those who get up early and want to look at cathedrals, and those who never set an alarm and think, “I’ll wake up when my body wants me to wake up. Even if it’s 4pm. And I don’t care if there is a pyramid over there - if I’m not inclined to go and look at it, I won’t.” I take holidays to unwind, not to learn.

In that respect, InterRailing around Europe when I was 18 was a mistake. We should have gone to fewer museums and eaten out more. It was in a year off after school, and I felt a great deal of pressure to travel to seem more “interesting” - just to be able to say that I’d done it, more than anything else.

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• Frequent flyer: Erin O'Connor

BACKGROUND

• My hols: Phil Daniels

• My hols: Roger Moore

• My hols: David Mitchell

• My hols: Tracey Emin

• My hols: Colin Firth

BACKGROUND

• My hols: Ricky Gervais

• My hols: Sam Robards

• My hols: Jimmy Carr

• My hols: Johnny Vegas

• My hols: Moby

So I went with a couple of friends and travelled around places such as Paris, Milan, Vienna and Prague, and I basically didn’t like it at all. I kept thinking we were going to run out of money or be robbed, and we were doing everything on a shoestring. It wasn’t very relaxing.

We were trying to sleep in railway carriages at night, and consequently spent most of the time overtired and hungry. We went to great places, which we would have enjoyed if, instead of staying in horrible youth hostels, we’d stayed in crap hotels, which would have been an immediate step up and wouldn’t have cost us much more.

Childhood holidays with my parents were never overly extravagant, either, but we would go away for a couple of weeks every summer. The first holiday I remember was when we stayed in a static caravan on a camp site in Brittany. It was 1978, the pound was really weak, so everything in France was expensive and we didn’t eat out at all. Instead, we went to one of the big supermarkets and bought stuff we couldn’t get at home.

One night, my parents tried to cook a lobster. I believe the prevailing wisdom now is either to stick a pin in it, so it’s paralysed and doesn’t freak out or at the very least to plunge it into already boiling water so that it’s a quick death. But the French couple in the caravan next door had told them that the way to cook a lobster is to put it alive in cold water, then bring it to the boil.

It was incredibly traumatic. The lobster was in the saucepan and it was perfectly happy until the water got a bit warmer. When it started to smell a rat, it gradually got more panicky. I remember the sight of its claw coming out over the side, splashing boiling water on my knee, and my mum running out of the caravan, screaming. I thought my parents had brought home a monster. I’ve not eaten lobster since.

My parents used to run hotels when I was very young, so they’re slightly odd people to go to a hotel or restaurant with, because they know how it all works. But I’ve always liked hotels. They cut life down to your most simple needs - there’s a bath, a telly and a bed, and you just phone if you need food. Sometimes, it’s nice for life to be reduced to that.

I’ve stayed in some terrible places over the years, though. The worst was a hotel near Grimsby. I was on a theatre tour and the company looked after us well - where there was a nice hotel, we stayed in it, so this was clearly the best there was to offer in the Grimsby area. It called itself the something country-house hotel. It wasn’t a hotel, it was a guesthouse at best. There was a fruit machine in reception - is that really very country housey?

It was the fact it was pretending to be Gleneagles that made it so absurd. If it had been honest, I’d have thought “This guesthouse has got a bar, fantastic!”, rather than “A country house? What the hell?”.

David Mitchell talked to Sian Thatcher

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