I AM often teased in Blackburn on "All the Air Miles you must be earning, Jack". I do get around, it's true, but for the record I don't make any Air Miles from these journeys.

There are two reasons. First, it's against the rules. Second, I end up using scheduled services less than you might think. Many of my journeys are within Europe, like this week -- Brussels/Copenhagen on Monday and Tuesday, Brussels again on Thursday and Friday. For those trips, I usually use one of the RAF's short-haul passenger jets, like the 125 or 146 (both types made, I'm pleased to say, by BAE or its predecessor companies).

For longer journeys I do go on scheduled services whenever I can and I always do, for example, to New York or Washington. It would be daft to do otherwise. But many of my longer trips involve odd routes for which either no scheduled service is available at all, or only via the most eccentric, circuitous routes.

For example, London/Astana (Kazakhstan)/Delhi/Bangalore and back which I did earlier in the year, or London/Istanbul/Islamabad/Peshawar (in north eastern Pakistan)/Kabul/London, which I did a couple of weeks ago. For those trips, we have to hire planes on a one-off basis.

The RAF used to have a small fleet of VC-10s for this kind of longer trip. They were paid for years ago (I think they were built in the Sixties or early Seventies) and were great planes, if a little thirsty and noisy.

But they were phased out three years ago. The last trip I did in one was to and from Abuja, the Nigerian capital, in early September 2001 to try to negotiate a new deal for Zimbabwe. (We got the deal on paper and it was a good one, but Mr Mugabe ratted on it, and the result is there to be seen in the dreadful fate of that once prosperous country.) But the VC-10s are still going strong, not carrying passengers, but as refuelling tankers.

Rule One on any trip I'm on -- apart from briefing myself carefully -- is to get to a gym or a swimming pool as soon as I arrive. If I don't manage it I end up feeling like a caged animal -- bad for me and, I am told, for those around.

Air travel is not very healthy and I get too little natural opportunity to walk to places; and a good work-out helps me deal with the time changes. So when I arrived in Copenhagen on Monday it was a quick change into my kit at the Ambassador's residence and then a drive across town to a vast gym, carefully selected by the very large and very fit Danish police officers looking after me.

In many places in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and of course North America, I'm usually reminded, and only half in jest, of some dreadful deed done to that country by "you Brits" (though often there's affection and recognition of the good things we might have done as well). But I hadn't expected such similar ribbing from my Danish host, the Foreign Minister Per Stig Moller. "Look over there," he said, from his office window, "across the river, beyond the bridge. The British Navy shelled all those houses in 1807, because we made the mistake of supporting the French in the Napoleonic Wars! And, after all," he continued, "the only thing we've ever done to you is to have the Vikings take over the whole of your country".

I may say that some of these Vikings' descendants are now to be found in the Danish police force. The gym was full of them.

The banter apart, it was a very good visit to Denmark. Our relationship is close, and straightforward. Although they are only the size of Scotland in population terms (5 million) they are, I was told, the UK's twelfth largest export market.

They joined the EU at the same time as did we, in 1973, and have a similar approach to it.

They recognise the EU's strategic significance, and the benefits it brings but are equally as determined as we are to maintain their national autonomy within it.

Back to Brussels tomorrow, for a two-day European Summit; no Air Miles either. But I'm not asking for sympathy.