My first big film break was playing a pimply soldier on Zulu Dawn with Burt Lancaster and Peter O’Toole, in 1977. I wasn’t needed for the first fortnight, so I sat by the pool at a five-star hotel in Durban, ordering steak sandwiches for free.

We filmed in Zululand, at Rorke’s Drift and Isandlwana, where the original battles happened, and there were old bullet cases and smashed carriage wheels still littered about. That was spooky — I’d love to go back. The producers had to pay the locals a fair bit over the odds to dress up as Zulu warriors, though.

Off the set, we British boys would sit around smoking “Durban poison”, the local grass, which seemed freely available. But Bob Hoskins and me got in trouble for inviting our driver to have a drink with us — plain-clothes police turned up and told us in no uncertain terms to pack that in. If we didn’t, the driver would be in serious shtook. That’s how apartheid operated — you didn’t get punished, but the black guy did.

Another eye-opener was playing Moscow with Blur, after Parklife was a hit. Damon Albarn knew I’d fancy that gig, because I was interested in the political climate there, post-Gorbachev. The old elite were still very much in charge, and we had these mafioso types bodyguarding us around Red Square. The music fans all had slightly wrong

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leather jackets — they looked like they’d come dressed up as people from the West. We played three nights in these monolithic theatres built for Soviet rallies. One of them even had a life-size statue of Lenin backstage, which politicians would

genuflect to before they made their speech, I guess. It was mothballed under a cloth, and we were instructed, very bluntly, not to try peeking at it.

I’ve been told off a fair bit on my travels. I’m a Chelsea fan, but I’ve only been overseas to support them once, when we won the Cup Winners’ Cup in Stockholm in 1998. Next morning, we had an hour to kill en route to the airport, so we stopped off at the Museum of Modern Art to buy some gifts.Unfortunately, there was a bar in the museum, and we were still a bit drunk from the night before. I got ticked off for touching up the exhibits.

My favourite city is New York. I love the skyscrapers, the little bars, the whole buzz. Jan used to visit on business, and while she was working, I’d take the subway to Coney Island — which is the end of the line, in every sense. It’s a throwback, a washed-up old seaside resort with a boardwalk that goes on for miles, and the Cyclone, a rattly wooden rollercoaster from the 1920s, straight out of Scooby-Doo.

It makes me a bit nostalgic for my childhood holidays in Clacton and Margate. We’d go to Pontin’s and stay in a chalet, which was one step up from a caravan. My mum still goes, in fact — they stage a weekend every autumn where they pretend it’s Christmas and celebrate with turkey and all the trimmings. She loves that one.

I’ve done Thailand and Barbados with the family: my missus likes the sun, and I take a stack of books with me. And now we’ve got a villa in a pine forest on the Costa de la Luz, a lovely unspoilt bit of Andalusia. I sneak off and play golf at Montenmedio, then barbecue some swordfish from the cavernous fish market in Barbate, which is really old-fashioned. The trick is to keep an eye on the matrons scuttling about looking for the freshest sardines.

It was my 50th birthday in October, and Jan and Ella surprised me with a trip to Tromso to see the northern lights. They’d caught me watching that TV programme with Joanna Lumley.

Flying into the city is sensational, swooping along the coastline of mountains and ice.

We ate reindeer stew with the Inuit, had a whale supper and went fishing on this immense fjord: they cooked our cod on board with buttery potatoes and bacon. And on the final evening, the lights showed up, going off like green fireworks. It was even more fantastic than on television.

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