All my life, the main characteristic of my holidays has been shocking disorganisation leading to fairly disastrous trips — although they have all turned into a good adventure.

When my girlfriend, Sian, and I went to Brittany a few years ago, we arrived at our gîte only to find it locked. The travel agent said I’d never booked it. So we ended up in the only place left: a man in a sailor’s hat and shorts took us to his house near Vannes.

It looked lovely, with a pool, but he put us in his garage. All it had was a little bed, an oven and a canoe down one wall. We could peer over the fence and watch him and his wife floating on lilos. You have to laugh.

I’ve just had another holiday in France, where my agent booked everything for me. It took a bit of the adventure out of it, but it was fantastic. After my last show in Edinburgh, I flew straight to the Côte d’Azur and was on a beach in Antibes the next day.

It was the first holiday where I’ve managed to switch off and read without anything random happening. But there’s always something wrong, isn’t there? She’d booked me into a really expensive hotel, and when my girlfriend and I sat on a lounger and ordered coffee, the bill was 75 quid. So I spent three days whingeing about that.

I went to India after university. I arrived with a mate at three in the morning and what I remember most is the rows of sleeping bodies on top of every bus shelter. We found a cheap hotel, complete with lice and massive spiders, and hugged each other to sleep, we were so scared. In the light of day, it was different — India bombards your senses, and we fell in love with it within hours.

We went on to Nepal and Malaysia, and did all sorts of jobs. We picked cabbages in Western Australia. It was hell, up to our knees in soaking fields. The guy started paying us in marijuana, which didn’t help. The cabbage machine had gone bonkers and, instead of planting one every 12 inches, had sprayed them everywhere. We were paid to tidy them up. And this field was the size of Cardiff.

Then the only place we could afford to go was West Timor, where we met an Indonesian guy and ended up subsistence-living on an island for five months. It was mind-blowing. We would frantically hunt goats round the beach and cook them, fish for lunch, climb palm trees and shake down coconuts. Then we woke up one morning and said we’d had enough. Back in Carmarthen, it was incredible how we just slotted back into normal life.

For family holidays, we used to go camping. My parents were teachers, so the car was loaded up and off we’d go for six weeks to the south of France, five of us in a plastic-seated Hillman Avenger. Basically, it was six weeks of car sickness. But we went to amazing places. And camping is always an experience.

Every camping holiday since, whether it was on the west coast of Wales or in the Australian desert, I’ve got flooded out. At Coober Pedy, in South Australia, they have only 1.9in of rain a year, but we were bailing out the tent. I’ve got a whole list of disastrous holidays.

The lost-luggage routine that I do on stage is an exaggeration of what happened when I lost my luggage and was left with one of those extendable handles. I was going to Ireland for a month, and watched this handle going round and round the carousel, with everybody laughing. Until, one by one, they left, and there was just me.

In the routine, there’s five minutes of me taking this handle to the desk and the woman saying, “Did you pack it yourself? Have you left it unattended? Could anyone have interfered with it?” And my dumbfounded responses. I got my luggage back — after it had been off on its own travels.

Partly to limit my carbon footprint, I’ve holidayed in Wales for the past few years. I’ve bought a little holiday flat on the beach near Mumbles. It’s very much for downtime — reading, walking, possibly going in the sea. And it doesn’t matter if the wind is howling on a winter’s night, it’s still stunning.

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