SPENDING a week under the same roof as your family can be a beautiful, sharing experience. For about ten minutes. Then, as I discovered last week when I spent seven days with three generations of my family in a holiday home on the Isle of Wight, the polite faade begins to disintegrate and the experience ends up about as beautiful and sharing as a Palestinian away-day to downtown Tel Aviv.

Not so long ago - three and a half years ago, to be exact - in pre-Munchkin times, holidays for me involved nothing more taxing than a sun lounger, a stack of thrillers and a six-pack of San Miguel. The days were long, warm and lazy, and the nights were, quite frankly, a bit of a blur.

Now, however, going on holiday is like signing up for a week-long stint in the army, with a pint-sized sergeant major issuing orders that must be obeyed on pain of a paddy. (For non-Yorkshire speaking readers, a paddy is a tantrum of volcanic proportions, usually involving screaming, gouging and projectile vomiting.)

A typical holiday morning now starts at 6am, when the sergeant major comes tearing into the room at breakneck speed shouting "get up, get up, get up". It might not be original, but believe me it works. After the 20th progressively louder repetition, you have to drag yourself out of bed before the holidaymakers in the neighbouring apartments set up a vigilante group to silence the human claxon horn in 1A by foul means or fair.

Then for the next 14 hours or so you have to find an endless supply of fun and exciting things to do, preferably involving football, dinosaurs, buckets, spades and dirt (for the purposes of rolling around in). Now don't get me wrong, fun and excitement are great, I like fun and excitement is one of my favourite things, but 14 hours of fun and excitement every day for seven days is blummin' exhausting.

Sometimes you just want to sit in the sun for five minutes with only one thought rattling around in your blissfully baking brain: "Is it too early for a beer?". But when you've got kids, especially young kids who physically can't sit still or stop talking for more than five seconds never mind five minutes, then basking with a beer and a book is out of the question. It just ain't gonna happen, so get used to it.

And you do. Especially if you are cunning enough to invite others along on your travels to share your lively load. Which brings us to the third generation in my holiday posse: grandma and granddad.

If you take my advice, which I assume you invariably don't, you won't leave home without one or preferably two grandparents stashed snugly in your hand luggage. Like plug adaptors and moist wipes, they come in very handy at holiday time.

Granted, they will drive you to distraction with their inability to make a decision about anything at all ever ("tea or coffee, erm, let me see, what are you having, oh heck, I don't know, what do you think, do I like cappuccino?"), grandma will make you want to do a nose-dive off the nearest cliff with her constant cleaning and fussing ("there really is no excuse for a mucky tea towel, not even on the Isle of Wight") and granddad will eat you out of house and home ("sorry love, I think I might have had the last Pringle/KitKat/whole roast chicken").

But they are a boon at keeping up the fun quotient. When you start to flag at footie or shirk your sandcastle making duties, on they come like a pair of fresh-legged World Cup substitutes (not English subs, obviously) and take over with more skill and enthusiasm than most people half their age can muster.

Then when the sergeant major is safely tucked up in bed at night in his khaki jimjams and you are lying on the sofa in a state that is probably clinically classed as comatose, you can always rely on grandma and granddad to get the evening's entertainment off to a flying start with their secret stash of board games ("Trivial Pursuit anyone?").

And so you see, while beautiful and sharing are not the first words that spring to mind when I think about last week, fun and board games are fine alternatives. And hey, at least now I know the names of all three brothers on Bonanza.

Updated: 08:36 Tuesday, July 16, 2002