Have a spotty record? The only London Bridge you'll ever see is this one in Lake Havasu, Arizona.
Photo: Aran Johnson

by Stephan Wilkinson

Disabuse yourself of any notion that those nice people who wrote the Magna Carta are any more concerned about personal freedoms and privacy than are U.S. border collies. Whether it's to show us that anything we can do they can do better or simply creeping authoritarianism, the British government is putting into effect a hugely expensive plan ($2.5 billion over the next ten years, the cost to be passed on to travelers) to collect a wide variety of data on every traveler daring to enter or leave those sceptered isles, whether by air, sea, or ground (the Chunnel).

How wide? Well, everything from name, rank, and serial number to your rap sheet, FBI file, automobile license plate and credit-card number. And who knows, probably your FaceBook page and that New Year's-party video your neighbor posted on YouTube. Up to 53 different pieces of information, which will be recorded when you buy a ticket to or from the UK. And the Brits will keep the information for as long as they please.

Got an outstanding traffic ticket or any other court fine? Go back home or pay it. You were once arrested for peeing beer in a dark parking lot and it got turned into a sex-offense charge? Don?t even bother to pack. Involved in a messy child-support case that hasn't been settled? Stay home. Somebody has a file on you because you were thrown out of a Bush rally? Go to France instead.

Oh wait, the French might do it too.

By Guy Martin

Last July, faced with a flood, comparatively speaking, of naked male sleepwalkers trudging down the halls of its 310 UK properties, the forward-thinking management of the Travelodge Company took the bull by the horns and commissioned a survey to make sure what they sensed -- stacks of towels being kept at reception to swathe whoever ambled by, ambulances called in the middle of the night for broken bones as people inevitably tripped or fell -- was, in fact, a trend. (One athlete-in-the-buff managed to bypass the staff and lock himself outside the hotel, only to be arrested, and presumably woken up, by the police.) 

Released two weeks ago, the Travelodge naked-sleepwalker survey revealed that there was a 700 percent increase in somnambulists (in UK Travelodges alone) over 2006. Some 95 percent of the sleepwalkers were men. Many of the naked horde wandered down to reception to ask to check out. Stress was cited as a primary factor. Was it work-related? Tony Blair's retirement? The continued presence of British troops in Afghanistan and southern Iraq? Attacks of middle-age angst as a result of an artificially strong pound sterling? David Beckham's move to Los Angeles?