HOLIDAYS, pah! I'm just nicely back from a couple of weeks off.

You can tell I'm back because the weather's perked up and looks set to stay fair until my next break.

I spent the entire July heatwave imprisoned in the office. By the time I got home every evening, the sun was behind the giant fir tree half-way down the garden.

Lured by the weathermen's lies about August being even hotter than July - and by a bank manager who just does not understand me - we decided not to book anything exotic.

We'd just stay at home, laze around on sun loungers and start on the gin and tonics at 9am every day.

Big mistake. It rained, or it was cool and dull. Our first night was spent in sodden Manchester at my wife's friend's birthday party where I knew only my wife and her sister.

I did get to know the barman quite intimately by the time the clock had tiptoed tipsily past midnight.

Then it was on to a couple of wet, duty days with the vegetarian inlaws in the Lake District. What a hectic social whirl. And then home again, with the rest of the fortnight yawning miserably ahead.

Every morning I got up came the dreaded question: "What shall we do today, darling?" as she eyed up an overgrown, 30-yard stretch of privet hedge, or the 1,000-acre, knee-high lawn complete with squatters and a crashed Lancaster bomber from the war. Fortunately, it was too wet.

So we went shopping in Doncaster.

Then we had half a day being alternately lobstered and deep frozen at the refurbished Turkish baths at Harrogate.

Fantastic place, with more half-naked bodies than on the beach at Bridlington. Oh, and a cloudburst on the way home was so sudden it caught us in the fast lane of the A1. It was a terrifying downpour, like being in a car wash at 70mph. With nil visibility, all you could do was brake and pray.

The endless days of inaction went on and on and suddenly, being back at work seemed an attractive proposition. One day I was tempted even to switch on the TV, but resisted this pointless exercise. You can only fit so many new kitchen lights, prune so many thousand plants and trees, paint so many ceilings, titivate this and service that, then you are all chored out.

When you have no focus for the day, little things become more attractive. Like buying a new hedge trimmer to tackle that wilderness; like brewing fresh coffee to pass a few minutes, rearranging the book shelves in alphabetical author order.

I even accompanied my good lady on the supermarket run and, well, quite enjoyed this strange, trolley-pushing ritual. Oh, and it rained.

But beware, with days to fill in you can get the buying bug.

One torrential morning, I browsed through every item in the 1,000-page Argos catalogue, even the hair-dryer and baby buggy sections.

Did you know you can now buy a satellite navigation system for your push bike? This particular vacation reminded me of childhood holidays.

One week every August my dad would say "cobblers", shut down his shoe repair shop, buy a family railway rover ticket and trek us off to the coast on day trips.

With three hungry starlings to feed he could barely afford to leave his business, let alone book us in somewhere. But he always picked the week when the rest of the world was away and the last thing on their mind was having their shoes soled and heeled.

So it was off to Brid, Scarborough or worse, Cleethorpes, to shiver on the beach and munch on sandblasted hard-boiled eggs and corned-beef sandwiches. Occasionally, we'd paddle in the sea and have goose-pimple competitions. Ah, happy days.

So, back in the present, with three days of my holidays left and the weather still lousy, I screamed "sod it", got a last-minute, one-night booking in Robin Hood's Bay and off we drove.

As we came down off the moors to the coast, the sun shone and we had two fantastic, hot days cycling the clifftop track between Whitby and Ravenscar and pigging out on fish and chips above the beach.

Give me a few months and I'll look back on it as the best holiday of my life. Honest.