All this (inaccurate) talk of staycations, reminds me of the only two holidays away we had as a family when we were little. First time, my parents borrowed a friend’s cottage in Wensleydale. Sounded idyllic. It turned out to be a sort of shack attached to a byre. It had....

....no electricity and the toilet was a chemical contraption in the cowshed. On the plus side, this meant we didn’t have to wash. On the downside, you had to have your last wee before it got dark. The cottage was in a deep valley and there was no sign of other humans or even...

...of the sky once you we’re inside. I remember how comforting it was to wake up at night and see an oil lamp moving outside the bedroom and know that mum was there, patrolling the corridor to keep us safe except that, in the morning.....

.....mum denied all knowledge of having been in the corridor or having a lamp. We only stayed one night as, luckily, my sister had to have her adenoids removed the following day. It wasn’t a massive success as holidays go.

Anyway, we didn’t go anywhere else for years - just days out (which is what a staycation actually is) until I was about 16 when we went for a week in a Suffolk long house. It was a rather beautiful house save for three things: all the rooms were laid out in a line with....

...no corridors so if you had the end bedroom, you had to walk through two others. Secondly, the owner was living rather resentfully in a caravan at the bottom of the garden and, thirdly, if you wanted to get in or out of the house, you had to avoid the vicious geese in the yard

...The leader of the flock had blue eyes, was called Napoleon and attacked on sight. Still, at least it gave you a healthy rush of adrenaline at the beginning and end of the day. My brother had been looking forward to fishing on the holiday but, unfortunately....

....my sister cursed him saying he would die from drowning so he had to spend the whole holiday at least 10ft away from water which rather ruined our planned trips to quaint seaside towns and riverside walks. Anyway, I think the main reason we went....

...to Suffolk was that the otter reserve was rumoured to be run by the wife of a former vicar my parents vaguely knew who had run off with a nature conservationist (the wife, not the vicar) and they wanted to suss them out.

For most of our childhood, we just spent the summer mooching about and trying to avoid being asked to do anything. I fell in the river once. Periodically some of the younger ones would go temporarily missing. We built tents out of tablecloths. It was generally OK.