Imagine opening a tourist guide - or consulting a Foreign Office travel advisory - and finding this description of the country you intended to visit. "In the capital city", the entry under Personal Safety tells us, "the risk of terrorism by extreme separatist groups remains high. The headquarters of the state broadcaster were recently devastated by a car bomb. Devices have also recently exploded outside pubs. On a quiet street of the capital, a popular entertainer was gunned down two years ago in cold blood on the doorstep of her home in an apparently motiveless slaying. Visitors with children may wish to know that fear of paedophilia runs so high - after several recent abductions in broad daylight - that howling mobs spasmodically take to the streets to administer vigilante justice to suspects. Food shortages or high prices may be apparent in the supermarkets after the mass burning of cattle and sheep. Don't be surprised still to find noxious pyres of dead livestock in some popular tourist locations."
What a place. The only good news is that you can drink the water, unless it worries you that there are reports of fish changing sex in the nation's rivers because of pollution.
The aim of this exercise in updating The Rough Guide To Britain is that some of those who live here are now reportedly reluctant to holiday in Spain after last week's attack by Basque separatists on a holiday resort. And yet we laugh at Americans who cancel their trips to Britain because of the Real IRA, foot and mouth and the assassination of Jill Dando.
As it happens, I read the reports from Spain a few days after returning from a fortnight in Corsica. It is an island of astounding beauty but, in the mountains which are a large part of its charm, the road-signs are routinely bullet-holed, as a result of the activities of separatists seeking autonomy from French rule.
A leading French official was machine-gunned as he left the opera a couple of years ago. On one morning of my trip, I picked up in a cyber cafe the news that an army barracks had been blown up. The first newspapers delivered back in England reported that one terrorist group had ambushed another at a wedding in a village past which I had steered my hire car while thinking how idyllic it all was.
The point is that the only direct evidence of this unrest to a tourist was that French airforce planes would occasionally roar above the beaches in what was presumably a show of strength. And my informant in the cyber cafe insisted that the separatists had no interest in harming tourists. A Corsica robbed of the source of most of its income would hardly be worth having from the French. This is logical, although you have to remember that Yugoslavia was once a popular package-holiday destination and Thomas Cook couldn't save that from ruin.
But, while such rational risk assessment may address the fear of potential travellers, it's no defence against the other obstacle to holidays in such places: liberal guilt. Italy is a country of frequent violent terrorism - seeing the sights in Florence, you can note in passing where various judges were blown apart - but the attacks come from the Mafia and, even at the most hand-wringing Islington dinner party, you don't meet many people who are pro-Cosa Nostra. Bombs in Italy can be seen as not involving us.
In Spain and Corsica, though, we are lazing on beaches or frequenting fine restaurants while a war of national self-determination takes place. Middle-class travellers (not tourists) - who would never have drunk South African wine during apartheid or visit Turkey because of its human rights record - suddenly fear that they are handing over traveller's cheques to a colonial government. We suddenly feel like the Royal Ulster Constabulary in shorts and sun-hats. The bandits in the hills may not understand that we are liberals under our sun-blistered skin. The feeling of being unwanted is always unpleasant but it's particularly unsettling when you're a guest.
If both terror and ethics can be overcome, the most useful reassurance for the cowardly tourist is that the travel industry is of such economic importance in most nations that governments take terrorism aimed at tourists far more seriously than mayhem which merely threatens the people who elected them.
After a number of Britons were ambushed in their hire cars on leaving Miami airport a few years ago, subsequent foreign visitors were escorted to the beaches in a pseudo-presidential motorcade of cop cars and out-riders. Since last week, Spanish beaches have been policed like a football match. In fact, it can be argued that among the safest places to take a holiday is a tourist resort in which there has recently been a car-bomb. The Rwandan government is currently spending much money in promoting an area recently blighted by genocide as a safe get-away. If Belfast happened to be the Torremolinos of the Irish Sea, the peace process would have begun soon after the Troubles.
But, largely because of the perception that holidays are intended to improve your health, recent events in Spain and Corsica will cause the tourist industries to look nervously at bookings for next year. Even those of us who live in a nation frequently blighted by terrorism and paedophilia are keen, when we take vacations, that the scenery should be the only thing likely to take our breath away.
