As a travel writer, I can get blasé about many aspects of travel: the free five-handed massage, the private plunge-pool out the back, those odd bits of overchilled orangey cheddar in an average Biz Class lounge.

But one slightly childish thing that always pleases me is stamps in my passport. They should be emotionally meaningless: they are, after all, tiny and potentially annoying examples of frontier bureaucracy, ways and means by which a nation keeps tabs on you.

And yet the other day I was going through the airport at Ibiza and getting my Spanish exit stamp – a Brexit benefit or drawback depending on how you feel – and the nice passport lady flicked through my passport, seeking a rare empty page, and said: ‘Wow, you have a lot of stamps.’ Like a five-year-old, I practically glowed with pride.

Because I do have a lot of stamps. And sometimes I simply like to look at them. I take out my passport and browse these small colourful paper tattoos of red tape, these laughter lines of a travelling lifetime, with as much pleasure as I might look at photos of Bhutan or Belize.

Right now my passport is so full of stamps it is in danger of filling up. However, there is a fair chance that this won’t happen – not because I have any intention of ceasing my travels, but because most countries (including and especially those of the EU) are moving on from the archaic era of physical stamps. In future our comings and goings will be monitored digitally – and speedily.

This will, of course, be great for shortening airport queues, and useful for Brits and border police trying to tot up whether they’ve exceeded their allotted 90 days per 180 in the EU: the computer will say yea or nay, and presumably give warnings.

But it also means we will kiss goodbye to the romance of the exotic stamp, that reminder of the time we crossed from, say, Chile to Bolivia via the Andes and the salt plains, that hour we traversed the emotionally tricky no man’s land from Eilat in Israel to Sinai, Egypt. Or that first time we landed in the USA and got one of the simplest stamps of all. The frontier dude smiles as he kerchunks his imprint and says: ‘Welcome to America.’ 

In my decades of travel, I have acquired some seriously – to my mind – exotic and wonderful stamps: Armenia, Madagascar, Greenland, Laos, Ethiopia, Easter Island, Vatican City, Oman. Some of the smallest countries demand entire pages of your passport – looking at you, Cambodia. Others make barely a dent, like France or Thailand, which is useful as I go there a lot.

Then there are the special stamps to truly esoteric destinations. My personal favourite is probably the one I got going into the quasi-independent ecclesiastical republic of Mount Athos in northern Greece. Not only was it fabulously rare, because they only let in a few dozen men (and no women) per week. It was also lavishly beautiful: the double-headed eagle of Byzantium, returned to life and impressed on my passport pages.

It was certainly more cheerful than the stamp I once got from the British embassy in Bangkok, which paid to have me repatriated from Thailand after I really mis-behaved. That stamp said ‘Impound Passport on Arrival in London’. And so they did.

Yet I miss that stamp too.