At the top of the one-in-three gradient, you discover a holiday heaven. It’s a fine shed, mind, built a century or two ago from local granite. One reason why the Flower House (as it is grandly named) in Constantine, Cornwall, narrowly stole the Family Holiday of the Year Award is that it reflects all that is good about the regeneration of English tourism. And it has a God-given location, tucked inside an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty at the top of the steepest road in Cornwall.

Announcing the results of the Independent/English Tourist Board Family Holiday of the Year Award. Not enough people know this, but the favourite destination of the British is .. England. To celebrate the fact, and to promote the joys of holidays at home, the English Tourist Board enlisted the help of readers of The Independent to find the Family Holiday of the Year, one of the England for Excellence awards made this week. Entries flooded in, with a broad range of nominations: resorts, cities, self-catering locations, hotels and activity centres. We drew up a short list, and spent a few weeks travelling the length and breadth of England.
After much discussion, we came up with a short list of five locations and nominations: a pounds 300m leisure development, a farmyard shed, a hotel on the north Cornish coast, a Derbyshire youth hostel, and an entire city. Ilam Hall Youth Hostel, Derbyshire, offers a wonderful location and excellent value for money; Bedruthan Steps Hotel, near Newquay, Cornwall, has a great family-friendly atmosphere – like entering a giant toy-box; the Oasis Forest Holiday Village, Cumbria, provides everything any family could ever need on a holiday (with the possible exception of guaranteed sunshine); and the City of York offers a wonderful range of indoor and outdoor activities.The winner, though, is a shed. The best I could come up with was “Smooth as Virgin olive oil in the air, but a bit of a Branson pickle when you land”.The winner was a Heathrow worker named Greg, who made play of Virgin’s much-publicised inflight entertainment: “We’ll give you a telly, but you’ll land on your belly”..

But after telling airport operators a thing or two about how to make life for long-suffering passengers, I fully expect never to see the bike again.Making such a fuss seems churlish compared with the disaster potential of aviation – exemplified by last Wednesday’s emergency landing by the Virgin Atlantic plane whose undercarriage failed on the final approach to Heathrow. Fortunately, no one was seriously hurt.Next day, GLR – the BBC radio station for London – asked listeners to suggest a new slogan for Richard Branson’s airline.The entrants included “Wheel get you there” and “Red carpet treatment in the air, blue light treatment when you land”. All the other delegates seemed to be flying out of Tenerife North on scheduled flights; I was the only one to have bought a cheap Skytours package, departing from the island’s South airport.You guessed it: after half-an-hour of watching all the bags come and go at Gatwick, I had to conclude the bike was making its own way back from Tenerife. The unhappily mangled remains of what used to be my bike were delivered late on Thursday.I shall repair the damage and take it to the Airports Council International conference in Seville next month. After meandering around Europe, the absent conveyance was finally tracked down in Dusseldorf.

Domestic holidays, I ventured, help avoid everything from Air Passenger Duty to lost baggage.More robust heckling After the convention everyone headed for the airport Or, more accurately, airports. It turned up some days later at Heathrow, having been “short-shipped” by Aer Lingus; “short-shipped” is a euphenism for “not shipped at all”.Then, last Sunday, I took issue with Britain’s travel agents at the annual ABTA convention in Tenerife. Why, I wondered, is it so much easier to book a foreign holiday than a British one? The industry is hurting both itself and the country, by exacerbating the tourism deficit – as a nation we spend pounds 10 million pounds a day more on overseas travel than we earn from foreign visitors coming to the UK. If you want to keep my custom, I announced, have the courage to recommend EasyJet (the direct-sell, no-frills airline) when it is the most appropriate choice.I checked my bicycle in as usual, only for it to vanish mysteriously. Travelling with a folding bicycle is the ideal solution for much of the research I undertake. Airlines, buses and railways are happy to carry the machine, and so far this year it has safely accompanied me to Harwich, Hook and Harare.