IT'S difficult to believe that only seven days have passed since I was sitting inside a sardine tin being continuously bombarded with frozen peas.

Caravanning on a Bank Holiday always follows pretty much the same pattern. You pack all your worldly goods into the car, travel to a muddy field, transfer all your worldly goods into a wobbly tin box on wheels and then sit and wait for the monsoon to begin.

For those who have never been caravanning - you lucky, lucky swines - the sound of rain bouncing off a caravan roof will be an unfamiliar pleasure. Let's just say that if the frozen peas on a sardine tin image fails you, hazelnuts on a snare drum isn't far off the mark.

Unfortunately, the sound of rain bouncing off a caravan roof is all too familiar to me. In fact, it has been part of the soundtrack of my life since I was a baby.

While you probably imagined that my family tree was chock-a-block with international playboys and glamorous socialites, I actually come from a long line of caravanners.

Explains a lot, doesn't it?

Within a few short months of my birth I was press-ganged into my first caravan holiday at Filey. I have no memory of this major life event at all, but it was obviously a massive success because we repeated the exercise year in and year out until I was eight.

You might imagine we then decided to swap windswept jaunts on the Yorkshire coast for something warmer further afield (or, at the very least, not actually in a field).

But no, we simply decided to stop shelling out good money every year to sit in someone else's caravan and bought our own instead, going halves with my grandparents - caravanners to the core who actually enjoyed running across a field in freezing sleet for a pee.

Don't get me wrong. Our caravan was the height of Seventies' sophistication - it had bunk beds and a wash room - and Filey was, and will always be, one of my favourite places on the planet. But, as the years progressed, I became less and less enamoured with caravanning, especially when it began to interfere with my pressing plans to snog half the male population of Leeds.

Spending every weekend in a caravan is about as appealing to a teenager as running naked down the high street in full view of all the cool kids shouting "look at my zits, look at my zits". So I set about making myself persona non grata by begging, pleading and generally making myself so obnoxious that my parents were eventually happy to leave me to my own devices at home in the vain hope that I might be abducted.

Now I have kids of my own however, I realise how lucky I was. The sproglets love the caravan and would spend every waking moment there if they could.

It's not the original van now of course. That was finally wheeled off to the great scrapyard in the sky last year and replaced with a sparkly new one with hot water, a loo and - drum roll, please - a shower.

But it retains all the essential van qualities.

It wobbles in the wind, the television only picks up Tyne Tees in what looks like a permanent blizzard and the rain pings off the roof with percussive regularity.

And so there we were once again on Bank Holiday Monday. It was bucketing it down; the caravan site looked as if it had been hit by a mud slide; and we each needed two cardigans, a cagoule, thermal gloves and a balaclava to make it down to the seafront without contracting hypothermia.

But, if I'm honest, there is nowhere I would rather have been.

Updated: 09:13 Monday, April 04, 2005