IT is a widely accepted point of view that you have to experience life in other parts of the globe before you can accurately assess the quality of it in your own.

Put more succinctly, people who spend holidays in sun-soaked zones, taking in the rays during the day and downing lashings of local brews at night, are unlikely to return to Blighty with much idea of what passes for life in that location.

There are exceptions among travellers, especially the professional ones. My favourite is print and television journalist Simon Calder. He has a degree in mathematics from The University of Warwick but chose travel journalism as a career, and an excellent job he has made of it. There can't be many parts of the world he hasn't visited, invariably eschewing "freebies", planning and travelling under his own steam.

I believe that Calder would be an ideal person to advise the United Nations on countries worldwide, rather than have that organisation rely on opinions gleaned by politicians, taken to certain areas on supervised tours. However, I'm not sure that Calder's conclusions would be appreciated or accepted.

I have a pal who was something of a Simon Calder, in that he loved to travel and took the opportunity to discover as much of the location and its indigenous population as he could. He's called Tom, an Australian by birth, who spent much of the 1960s and 70s in the UK, working as a musician with a number of name acts, The Bachelors among them. We met and became friends when we were employed as drummers on cruise liners between 1978 and 1982. By then Tom had left the UK and was based in Oz, though he spent much of his life travelling as a professional musician.

In recent years Tom, now in his 70s, has had to restrict his wanderings to an occasional visit to the UK, accompanied by his wife, and always does his best to organise a reunion. We spend much of our time together updating each other on the welfare of families and friends, but this time my friend gave me a sad but deeply considered indictment of the way Britain has gone further into the dumper since his last visit.

His main complaint was the cost of travel. He simply couldn't believe that for him and his wife to come from London by train to see us would mean an outlay of around £450. He added that if prices in the UK continued to escalate at the current rate, it would be cheaper for us to fly to Sydney to see them!

Other observations and experiences which had my pal reaching for the smelling salts: £6 for two small tubs of ice cream at a London show; £4 for a bottle of beer in a London hotel; the disturbingly high level of street crime and the omnipresent fear of burglary, especially among the elderly.

As I said at the beginning of this column, you have to look outside to see, clearly, what is happening in your own back yard. Tom looked and didn't like what he saw. I doubt he will be back.