The couple had the idea after seeing the cheap deals available as many students chose to abandon planned gap years in favour of going to University before next year’s fee increases.

‘We scrimped and saved to buy that boy the best education possible and this is how he rewards us,’ said his father, John, 47, from the family home in Canterbury. ‘It was bad enough James missing out on both his choices, but what really hurt was receiving an offer through clearing from London Metropolitan University.’

Arguments about their son’s progress had brought John and his wife Linda close to divorce but this opportunity has reunited them. John will take voluntary redundancy and some undeclared stock from his job at the doomed Pfizer site in Sandwich, while Linda will quit her job in riot control at a Ramsgate secondary school. The number of Facebook party invitations has fallen considerably.

Having let out their house for a year, the couple say they intend to do every continent, try anything at least once and just chill generally, but tour company operators fear the worst. ‘We normally get away with awful facilities, some ladyboys and a bit of bungee jumping,’ said a representative. ‘We know sod all about the actual countries themselves, but this lot are checking Trip Advisor, insisting on edible food and expecting a detailed itinerary.

‘The kids don’t even wake up on the on the overland trip to Gibraltar to get to Africa, never mind drink, but their parents are demanding to take in Champagne, Burgundy and Bordeaux at no extra cost before we even leave France. They wanted Tours as well, but it’s obvious that they’d be too pissed and too busy trying to cop off with each other to even bother looking round.’

‘It’ll be the cheesy graduation one from the mantelpiece, I know it,’ the gap year traveller told her kidnappers yesterday. ‘I’ve been begging them to take it down for years, but for some reason they love it. I don’t know why I ever thought that blouse was flattering, or what kind of statement those glasses were supposed to make. And how humiliating that my greatest achievement in more than three decades on the planet will be reported as a 2:2 in American Literature and Media Studies from De Montfort. If I’d known I was going to be kidnapped I’d have worked so much harder at university.’

After being seized by masked gunmen last Tuesday, Campbell was forced, in a chilling video recorded by her captors, to plead for the release of a dozen freedom fighters incarcerated in Israel in exchange for her life. ‘It was so traumatic,’ she sobbed afterwards. ‘At one point when they were holding a knife to my throat, I suddenly realised that everyone watching would have been able to see the henna tattoo on my neck that I got one misguided night in Mumbai. And I can’t believe my religious fundamentalist captors didn’t forcefully cover my hair during the recording – now all the pictures in the papers will reveal my unfortunate experiment with cornrows.’

But as Campbell imagined her distraught parents tearfully responding to questions outside the family home, possibly holding that picture of ‘their little girl’ when she was 13, had enormous braces and looked like a boy, it was then a more horrific outcome to her predicament occurred to her. She suddenly realised that anytime now, somewhere in a TV studio in London, the funny-looking charity volunteer that she’d somehow ended up shagging after her leaving drinks would be interviewed as her boyfriend and talk about ‘the Trisha I knew’ in that awful nasal voice of his.

‘Oh God, just kill me now,’ she begged her AK47-wielding guard.

Dr Turmoil

‘It was the crass materialism of India that got me down,’ says Khapur. ‘On every street corner, it seemed, there was a poster urging you to buy something, often featuring a young model with a bare midriff and toes sticking out all over the place. I know it’s a cliché, but yes, I came here to find myself in that mystically evocative land of middle England, which is why I am currently crashing at a Premier Inn in Stevenage.’

Like many from the Indian sub-continent, Khapur struggled to adapt to Britain in the first few weeks. ‘The conspicuous wealth was shocking, of course, but sadly in the end you just screen it out. But on the plus side, the temples are so old and atmospheric, unlike the gaudy concrete dens of noise at home and the British are not nearly as rubbish at cricket as I had been led to believe. The conditions they make people put up with on the railways is frankly beyond the pale, mind.’

With his visa about to run out, Khapur is hoping to extend his stay. Rather than take the easy route of teaching Gujarati to evening classes of council outreach workers, he hopes to do some voluntary work among the dispossessed street kids of Stevenage, many of whom aren’t even allowed a plasma screen TV in their bedrooms.

‘I miss India sometimes, but I feel that my spiritual destiny is here in Hertfordshire. These poor, deprived people need me,’ he says. ‘Mind you, some of their customs really are hard to take on board. Do you know when they come back from Disneyland, they don’t even have to use cows’ piss and shit to purify themselves? How weird is that?’

Following an expensive education in Switzerland, the reclusive heir is said to have told his father over dinner that presiding over a brutal regime in which Marxist doctrine is enforced to the letter was some ‘heavy shit’ and that he planned to ‘chill for a bit and, like, find myself’ after the stresses of his ‘mega-stressful’ final year.

A spokesman for the ailing dictator confirmed angrily ‘rather than spend a year massaging official tractor production statistics, he’s been banging on about how he’d like to go inter-railing with a few mates before heading off to Glastonbury – all funded by a bit of busking.’

Kim Jong-il is however thought to be confident that he can heal the rift, as he managed to earlier this year after his son was discovered in his basement by party officials ‘laying down a few tracks’ with pals instead of overseeing the execution of several dissidents.

Gary Stanton

‘I’ve been in the loyal pet business all my life,’ Shandy told reporters before setting off. ‘It’s all I’ve known for three years, though it feels more like 21. It can get a bit monotonous; chasing sticks and sniffing other dogs’ arses just isn’t doing it for me anymore. I know my old man used to say that the grass is always greener until you wee on it every day, but I’d still like to find out for myself, you know?’

Although Shandy insists that his trip is about ‘personal growth and giving something back’, his owners, Mr and Mrs Lucas, note that he suddenly contracted the travel bug at about the same time that Princess, a playful daschund bitch next door, produced a litter of puppies with a distinct golden lustre to their coats. ‘We’ve seen a change in Shandy, for sure’ said Mrs Lucas, ‘and though he calls it ‘ennui’, I call it letting your hair go ungroomed, sitting around all day licking your testicles and not even bothering to go outside to shit.’

The early signs were that Shandy was making concessions to his principled approach to his gap year. Despite promising to find employment on his travels and immerse himself in new cultures, by late afternoon on the first day he had already made two reverse-charge calls to the Lucases asking for money, and Mr Lucas’s credit card company had reported a suspicious transaction at a tattoo parlour and a hefty bill for room service and ‘extras’ at a mixed 5-star kennels just outside Sidcup.

However, Shandy did finally make it to Asia, and was last reported to be delighted to have found a restaurant in South Korea that had a picture of a dog on the outside. He said he was just going in to ‘check out the scene’.

Bryn Goodyear, nicknamed ‘Buzz Gapyear’ by his sceptical friends has been reunited with his family in Reading today after leaving home last August. He had been told by his parents that they would help him with planning and financing a gap year if he would first get a job and come up with a few suggestions, but in response to such intense pressure he left home and took the National Express coach to Gatwick. Having spent all his money he took a cleaning job, but with the cost of his lodgings and going out with the lads in Crawley every weekend, he never saved enough for his trip.

‘I realised I would have to change my plans,’ said Bryn as he tucked into his first home-cooked meal in almost a year. ‘Infinity and beyond was like in your dreams, and I soon saw that round the world was going to be a bit of an effort. So I thought, Europe. I flew Ryanair to Bordeaux to do the grape harvest but they didn’t have any managerial posts and expected me to actually like pick grapes? So I’m like, I’m going to do media studies at De Montfort Uni and I could use my skill set to push back boundaries in a rapidly changing media landscape and they like shrugged?’

Bryn sent emails from his hotmail account from time to time saying how his travels were progressing, but his parents became suspicious when one of the attached photos had ‘library picture’ printed at the bottom. Their suspicions were confirmed when they recognised a picture of Torremolinos from the Airtours brochure they had kept from their 1989 honeymoon.

When asked what he intended to do next, Bryn said he might chuck Uni in and go on a road trip, once he had bought a car and passed his test. ‘I can do the practice in theory, and the theory in mocks but not in practice,’ he said. ‘But the instructor keeps like, giving you instructions?’

A quiet morning at Tie Rack in the south end of Heathrow’s Terminal 2 was turned upside down yesterday, when casual browser, Luke Tanner, 18, ‘found himself’ in the silk scarf section of the accessory-based store, putting an end to his Gap Year before it had even begun.

Tanner, was hours away from boarding a flight to Australia; a popular destination for ‘Gappers’ all over the world, when he experienced the life-changing event. ‘I was just killing time, really, waiting for my flight,’ he said. ‘Then it hit me! I thought it was going to happen walking along a beach at sunset or camping in the outback… But in Tie Rack!’

‘We’re very happy for him,’ said Lucy Jackson, shop assistant, and first to congratulate Tanner. ‘Airport stores are the last place you’d think people would find spiritual meaning and inner-peace, but it does happen. A lady ‘found herself’ outside the Starbucks in Terminal 3 a couple of weeks ago.’

A newly confident, mature and philosophically-reconciled Luke immediately rang home to inform his parents. ‘I’m so proud of him,’ Mrs Tanner told reporters, in learning that her son had found himself before even leaving the country. ‘I’d spoken to other mums, whose kids have been abroad a few times and come back just as spoilt, confused and screwed-up as they were when they left. I’m just relieved Luke didn’t have to waste all that money.’

Looking back on the incident, Tanner admitted he regretted not considering the outcome of sharing his good news, and was reportedly ‘a bit gutted’ that he’s no longer able to justify his expensive trip anymore. However, his search for deeper meaning in this life will continue next year, and he is already planning a trip to Clinton Cards in the Gatwick Village.

TheTurnip