SCHOOL holidays - who needs them? Parents with pre-school children don't, working parents with school-age children certainly don't and people with no children definitely don't.

Teachers might argue that they do - but heck, they're in the minority.

School holidays stink.

Here's what school holidays mean for the above three groups of people (at present I come into the first category, but spent many years in the third. And, next year, wracked with terror, I will enter the second)...

Couples with pre-school children

The quiet local park where my little daughters play see-saw and drive the model train has been taken over by big, boisterous, unsupervised kids, charging around, sending the mini roundabout spinning at the speed of light, or lounging about on the roof of the train, their size-20 trainers dangling into the cab.

Pleasant days out are blighted by long queues at cafes that, in term time, make the Marie Celeste looked packed.

Now you can't get a table, and if you do - in the mad scrum that takes place when one becomes free - no-one will have had time to wipe it and it will be coated in the sticky remains of a fizzy drink.

School holidays mean queues for ice creams, queues for toilets, huge queues for museums and other attractions and - wherever you go - noise.

Working couples with school-age

children

What to do when you're meant to be at the office, but there's no-one within a 1,000 mile radius to look after the children? It's a terrible dilemma that I will shortly encounter.

I was disturbed to read that, in a recent survey, a whopping 27 per cent of people give up work completely when the children break up for summer and hope that, come September, they will get another job.

What a desperate situation to be in, I'm having nightmares already - the best I can hope for is to break a limb, giving me a legitimate reason to take time off.

Yet even those who are able to take long holidays, or work from home (seven per cent do it, Lord knows how) are faced with the problem of keeping their children amused for 15 hours a day.

You can throw some old clothes at them and try the old dressing up routine, or set them a Blue Peter-style art and craft project. But the survey, by Abbey National, found that such simple pleasures are not enough and that parents expect to spend at least £50 a week on games, toys, treats and trips to keep their offspring happy.

Couples with no children

Childless couples find their favourite restaurants blighted by hordes of loud, rude children and often - their louder, ruder parents.

Consequently, they become ultra-selective in their choice of places in which to dine and go so far as to stop going out to eat before 10pm - with the hours youngsters keep these days you're not safe before then.

Peaceful beauty spots where you can sit and canoodle with your beloved become rowdy picnic sites, littered with fast food cartons and empty drink cans and populated by teenage gangs with nothing to do but chuck stones at the wildlife.

Horrible.

School holidays bring one small ray of sunshine - there are fewer cars on the road during the morning rush hour.

But in the evening it's worse when families in their four-wheel drives clog up the ring road as they return from a day out.

As I said earlier, school holidays, who needs them? Why not a fortnight? That's enough for everyone else.

In my opinion, they are a month too long.