NEWFANGLED foreign holidays are all very well but they are not a patch on good old-fashioned family holidays here in the UK.

OK, so you usually get better weather when you venture abroad on a package holiday, you can booze yourself silly around the clock, you can schmooze members of the opposite sex who don't speak English and therefore don't know you are a brainless twit with the conversational capacity of a teaspoon, and you can immerse yourself in another culture ("paella and chips please, love") and try out your language skills ("dos beers, amigo!").

But apart from the weather, the boozing, the schmoozing and the culture, foreign package holidays are a bit of a dead loss if you ask me. I mean, who on earth wants to go on holiday to a place where the sun shines for 11 hours every day, the food is brought to your table by a waiter who could easily pass for Antonio Banderas' younger and more handsome brother and where every hour is happy hour in the beachside bars?

Not me mate. Where's the fun in that? It's all very well having a lovely time for two weeks but what are you going to talk about for the remaining 50 weeks of the year if your holiday wasn't a complete farce from start to finish?

No one wants to hear stories of lovely holidays on lovely foreign islands where the beaches, hotel, people and food were all lovely, lovely, lovely.

That's just boring with a capital B-O-R-I-N-G. What we Brits want is to be regaled with tales of holidays from hell not pathetic postcards from paradise.

I'm sorry but there really is more fun to be had griping for years to come about a terrifically bad family holiday in a rickety caravan in Cleethorpes than there is in spending two nice but uneventful weeks in the sun.

You see, it all comes down to value for money - a subject close to the heart of all true Yorkshire lasses like myself. A lovely foreign package holiday offers two weeks of entertainment while a really crap British holiday offers a lifetime of entertainment in the telling, embellishing and telling again.

Now you don't have to be Einstein to work that one out, do you?

We all have our own favourite holiday-from-hell tale that we wheel out at every opportunity. My own involves a tiny caravan in a field in Devon, a dodgy Portaloo and a farmer who had installed a cattle-grid outside his own loo so he could load his rifle in good time to send desperate campers scuttling back into the shoulder-high grass with their pride in tatters and their trousers round their ankles.

But I won't regale you with that now, I'll save that one for another day. I had actually hoped to be able to regale you with a horror story about my latest jaunt, from which I returned just three hours ago. Unfortunately, however, our family holiday to Bamburgh was not terrible (drat), the cottage was lovely (double drat) and good beer, food and conversation were in plentiful supply (triple drat with a blummin' heck on top).

The week was not without its moments of course, but stories about a delicatessen flogging sausages for £6.20 a pack ("what are they, solid gold sausages?") and a small boy giving his grandma a handful of rabbit poo ("yummy chocolate buttons, grandma") do not a column make.

I'm sorry, I really wanted to be able to share tales of unutterable terror with you but the only lousy thing about the holiday was the weather. And it's not as if we Brits like talking about the weather, is it?

Next time I promise I will do better. I will have a really awful time, perhaps even injuring myself in a painful yet strangely comic accident, and will regale you for weeks, months, maybe even years with horrific tales from my terrible holiday.

Now where did I put that brochure for scuba diving holidays in Skegness?