travel types

If you are in Overland Park, say, visiting one of the many corporate headquarters (it's got Applebee's, Sprint-Nextel and Petrol Oil and Gas, to name a few), you can find yourself with a choice: barbecue, steak or a trip into past travel practices.

Or, in my case, all three.

Barbecue and steak can, even at top dollar, prove lifeless tropes in too many other areas of the country, but not here -- where it sometimes feels like you can walk out back behind the restaurant to pick your individual cow. Stay right where you are in Overland Park, if you wish, and hit Fiorella's Jack Stack Barbecue, one location of a small, high quality local barbecue chain.

If you are looking to take advantage of the high-end steak scene, travel north toward the Kansas City stockyards (I'm a devout carnivore, so my mouth waters just as I type "stockyards") and all the great steakhouses it has to offer, hopping over the border to the Missouri side of Kansas City -- less than an hour's drive -- for one of the best options, Plaza III Streakhouse.

fter two years of this, I met a man who was a troubled soul, a coke addict and an alcoholic, who took me on lots of holidays in return for which I supplied sex on demand and an enormous amount of therapy. Suntan aside, I paid a very heavy price for this relationship. When I discovered the extent of his dishonesty – the receipts, the condoms – I unravelled for the last time, not helped by the amount of cocaine I was taking. I look back and cringe at my total lack of self-respect, and anyone might have thought I was determined to destroy myself. But let's remember: like guns, alcohol and drugs don't kill people – people kill people.

I'm well aware that a person can be a problem drinker without ever touching illegal substances, but for me, and millions of others, alcohol was the ultimate "gateway drug". Although, bizarrely, I lost my virginity sober, I didn't have sober sex for another 23 years , and every other new substance or behaviour I tried was done while cushioned in alcohol. People do more sexual, narcotic, or violent things under the influence of booze than anything else. It's the sheer weight of numbers that I can't get over.

I just don't know why governments don't do anything about all the crime that's committed, day in and day out, which, without alcohol in the mix, simply wouldn't happen. Alcohol is, exponentially, an bigger gateway drug than cannabis has ever been or ever will be, and it's about time that the Government woke up and stopped wasting everyone's time with the "war on drugs", which is about as nonsensical as the "war on terror". And now it's January, official "wagon" month in the modern British citizen's calendar. Everybody's doing what they spend the rest of the year talking about – giving up alcohol and other intoxicants. People are desperately proud of their January abstinence, not least because this excessive self-denial will entitle them to party all the harder come 1 February.