Planning the ideal holiday to France: Fantasies don't have to be serviceable, still less accurate

I have been grounded by a book deadline and travelled less in the past four months than usual. Basically, I have a target, which I do not always hit, of one trip a month. But latterly my horizons have been defined by the edge of my desk, not the curvature of the Earth.

A critically mounting sense of frustration-blurring-into-despair has been made indecently worse by daily messages from two travelling children. A daughter in the restaurant trade is eating her way around Spain, from the Basque country to Andalucia, in what she earnestly, if charmingly, calls “research”. While I am struggling, painful keystroke-by-keystroke, towards a contracted 100,000 words, she is eating fresh-off-the-boat calamari in Cadiz and sending pictures of white villages and blue skies.

Meanwhile, I have a son who has been in Mexico. On a grey and cold London day, I find pictures of him luxuriating in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico with a beer in his hand and his girlfriend on his arm.

Then I have a very droll acquaintance who has just sent out lunch-party invitations the design of which consists of a typographic arrangement of all those words indicating things that preoccupy harassed people who are too old to rock and too young to go on a Saga Holiday: relatives, interest rates, hangovers, sex, no sex, roadworks, speed cameras, lawyers, neighbours, HRT, builders, accountants, Ryanair, statins and weather. It seems a good point to start thinking about escape.

Which is exactly what I have been doing when inspiration fails me. What is the ideal trip forming in my imagination? Actually, it's not anything very unusual. On the contrary, it is something very familiar. Naturally, unless a merciful Providence provides a private jet, we will avoid the barbaric horror of an English airport. Instead, we will go by car. On this very special day there are no roadworks on the South Circular and the M2 is free of traffic as the sun comes up on our way to Dover.

It's the ferry, not the Tunnel, because the new valet service at the docks takes the car off you while a concierge-like figure escorts you to the ship's restaurant. At Calais, our car is valeted and off-loaded while the concierge sees us through border formalities.

Avoiding Paris, we speed through Reims and Troyes. The autoroute is deserted and we make our favourite little auberge near Beaune for frogs' legs, jambon persille, and coq au vin. Next day, a fast drive to the southerly point where the olives begin and northern sprouts are only a memory. Turn east at Montelimar and drive 10 minutes to a deserted village with a fine small hotel in a tastefully restored crusader castle.

Of course, we have skipped the banlieues and their racailles, the desolate Zones Industriels, the big-box urban sprawl, intrusive McDo' and the appalling French motorway services. But fantasies don't have to be serviceable, still less accurate. And France still satisfies most of mine. I don't think fantasies have been damaged by recent atrocities. I think they've been enhanced.