Pack up your troubles and take them with you

IF YOU thought your summer holiday was going to be the moment when you finally put aside the accumulated angst and stress of the last six months, forget it. According to a survey sent to me by Barclaycard, the annual holiday turns out to be one of the most stressful things we will do in the whole year, right up there with moving house or being taken to court.

Here are the bare statistics: while on holiday this year, half of us will quarrel with our partners, a quarter of us will be struck down by illness and a third of us will spend the time fretting about money. Lots and lots of us in fact will be aching to get back home by the end of the holiday.

The authors of the survey have brought in a psychologist, one Trevor Jellis, who cheerfully informs us that, thanks to all the strain on our relationships and budgets, holidays do indeed "bring out the worst in people".

In other words, as soon as we get out onto those beaches we instantly revert to the selfish, childish petulance that doubtless characterised our first trips to the Isle of Wight all those years ago. According to the research, this phenomenon - which I call "Rhodes Rage" - springs primarily from partners blaming each other for spending too much money and for forgetting to pack things.

Other major disputes crop up over partners' bad map-reading skills, partners ogling other people on the beach and partners drinking too much.

In short, a holiday not beset by major family arguments and Rhodes Rage is not a proper holiday. The whole point of going abroad, it appears, is not to relax but to get our stress out into the open and behave horribly badly. The point of the Spanish sunshine is to bring all our bitterest bile to the surface. If we stayed at home we would simply repress it.

Except that oddly enough all these family rows hardly begin to dissipate the torment we put ourselves through. Dark, nagging anxieties will remain to plague us, according to the report. A third of us will be biting our fingernails over whether the money is going to last out. Half of all women on holiday will be nervous about losing their handbags and an equal proportion will have their equanimity disturbed by the thought of contracting skin cancer. At least a fifth of us will have had a car accident on holiday and will worry about having another one.

And, although not mentioned in the report, the thought of even the world's favourite airline being grounded through strike action will certainly not aid our digestion when far from home.

But if all this is not enough, we will then face lots of strange laws and conventions deliberately designed for us inadvertently to break them. Among the problems commonly mentioned in the report were speeding, being drunk and disorderly and taking photographs in restricted areas. Smuggling fireworks through customs and offending Cornish people were also cited.

A profound urge to self-destruct while on holiday? Or an innocent belief that the same standards of behaviour do not exist overseas? When Brits riot in Turkish restaurants or vomit down the shirt fronts of Spanish waiters are they shocked to be arrested, because they do not imagine they have broken any laws? When they are booked for speeding in Milan do they wonder how Italian policemen can have the cheek to tell them how fast not to drive?

All the same, the possibility of going to jail is just another problem to deal with and the evidence does seem to be overwhelming that we crave worry and fear as an essential part of the holiday experience.

On the basis of this report I have decided that for my next holiday I am going to take the whole of my extended family in a flashy car to a crowded hotel resort where we can worry like hell about losing the car, then have big bust-ups to get it off our chests. Then I'll come home, nicely refreshed.