It was brave of Travelodge to reveal this week that in the past year more than 400 men have been found wandering naked in their sleep around its hotels, for this might very well unnerve its more sensitive customers. According to the hotel chain, the incidence of naked sleepwalking, which occurs almost exclusively among its male guests, has increased sevenfold in 12 months.

The staff of Travelodge are now being trained in how to deal with this unsettling phenomenon. A supply of towels has been placed at its hotel reception desks to restore the dignity of naked sleepwalkers, for they apparently have a habit of winding up in the reception area, asking for a newspaper or trying to check out.

I have a particular interest in this story, for the same thing happened to me five winters ago when I was staying in a luxurious seaside hotel at Ocho Rios on the north coast of Jamaica. I don't think I have ever sleepwalked before or since, but I did so on this occasion and subsequently, as I recall, wrote about it in this newspaper.

Luckily, I wasn't completely naked. I had a shirt on. But following what is now revealed to be a common pattern, I awoke at 4am in front of the hotel reception desk. The experience was odd, because I had thought I was conscious and that I had gone outside on to the balcony of my room to smoke a cigarette and admire the moon. But this was clearly not the case, for there was no moon that night and my room had no balcony. Instead, I had left my room by the front door, shut it behind me, and walked in my sleep along 100 yards of corridor and across the hotel dining room to the reception area, where I woke up and obtained a spare key to my room from the night clerk so that I could go back to bed.

Why did I do it? A spokesman for the Edinburgh Sleep Centre says that sleepwalking is caused, among other things, by "a stressful lifestyle" and "alcohol abuse", so maybe they were the trouble. They could also explain why there are so few women sleepwalkers among Travelodge's guests.

But there is no obvious explanation as to why its male sleepwalkers are all naked. Does nobody wear anything in bed any more?

· What can we do to stop Britain's population soaring to unmanageable levels? According to the government's latest predictions, the number of people living in this already overcrowded island will grow from 60 million to 70 million in the next 15 years and carry on growing just as fast thereafter. Since more than 70% of this predicted rise is directly attributable to immigration, there will obviously be more demands for stricter immigration controls. But these will have only limited effect while the citizens of EU countries are free to come and work in Britain as they wish.

The only answer is to make Britain an undesirable destination. We should aspire to economic failure. We should pray for the recession that some think is on its way. We should encourage smoking, binge-drinking, and overeating. And if we are lucky we will end up like Russia where the population is in constant decline.

It is predicted that Russia will lose up to 50 million people during the next half-century, while we will be piling them on at a similar rate. How does Russia do it? Statistics published this week offer some clues: during the first nine months of this year, 29,000 Russians committed suicide, 24,000 were killed in road accidents, and 14,000 died of alcohol poisoning. With the average life expectancy of the Russian male down to 59 years, people are dying off much faster than they are being born, and the country's population has already fallen this year by 356,000. This is a remarkable achievement.

· The American photographer Annie Leibovitz has finally weighed in on behalf of the Queen and said it was right that the controller of BBC1, Peter Fincham, should have lost his job because of the way that a documentary film about her Buckingham Palace photo shoot had been edited.

The film suggested, wrongly, that the Queen had huffily stormed out of the session when Leibovitz suggested she remove her crown. "The BBC has a very important image and name," the photographer said, "and you want to be able to trust them."

The episode was one of several incidents of deceit that have undermined trust in television programmes and caused much soul-searching at the BBC. Another involved the BBC's "creative director" Alan Yentob, who was accused of being filmed as if nodding at people he had never met, who had actually been interviewed by someone else for his arts show Imagine.

But what was not questioned was the practice of nodding itself. More than 30 years ago I was briefly a reporter for ITN, and I was told then that a reporter should never nod during cutaways because nodding implied agreement with the interviewee, thereby putting his impartiality in doubt. Standards must have been much higher then.

· This week Alexander went to Milan and thought how much finer a city it is than people make out. "The late Gothic cathedral, often derided for its supposed vulgarity, is awe-inspiring in its grandeur." He is also reading Nemesis, Max Hastings' fascinating history of the battle for Japan in the second world war.