YOU can tell it's the holiday season because already I've heard a few moans from people who have flown off to sunnier climes and found they weren't sunny at all.

You have to be a very nice person indeed not to have to hold back a slight snigger when someone who has just paid a couple of thousand hard-earned pounds to bask in balmy heat relates that they spent a large part of their holiday clinging to the bedpost to avoid being washed down the road by Hurricane Mildred.

It's even more satisfying when Britain has had an unaccustomed heatwave and the people who bored you with holiday brochures for weeks are whiter than you are when they return from said holiday and still suffering from the tropical trots.

I've come to the conclusion that holidays are fairly unnatural things anyway.

Firstly you have nothing to do for two whole weeks, or rather you aren't supposed to want to do anything for two (or more) weeks. Then you remove yourself from the comfortable surroundings of your own home, throw yourself at the mercy of several transport organisations whose main aim is to cause the maximum amount of frustration to as many people as possible, and arrive in a strange country where you probably don't speak the language at some godforsaken time in the morning because most holiday companies seem incapable of getting you there at a decent hour.

Then you will stand shivering in your new summer outfits as dawn breaks over the oil refinery on the edge of the airport before an out of breath courier arrives to usher you like a pack of naughty schoolchildren onto a coach to drive off into the chilly morning. But not before there is a delay while the courier searches for the missing couple. And there's always a missing couple.

Then when you get to the hotel it will be too late to go to bed and too early to do anything else other than stare out of the window and realise why the word close when used to describe near the sea had had inverted commas around it.

That is day one of your holiday and you have paid for it. The last day will be a reverse of the first, except the missing couple will be found in the hotel bar.

In between it's in the lap of the gods. Most people have a good time. Some end up on 'holidays from hell' programmes. Some moan constantly because things are so different, so much so that you wonder why they bothered to travel abroad in the first place. We once stayed at a hotel with a couple who complained non-stop for a fortnight. They didn't like any of the 'messed about' food, it was too hot, all the staff were foreigners (they were Spanish, and we were staying in Spain!), the money was 'funny', the beer was all fizzy lager and the hire car had the steering wheel on the wrong side. "You'd think they would have a stock of cars for English people, wouldn't you?' said the woman. I felt like saying that you'd think they would allow English people to drive on the other side of the road, wouldn't you?' but didn't.

When we began to take family holidays abroad I learned through experience to avoid the dreaded words 'self-catering accommodation'.

Why? Because self-catering really should have read 'woman of the family catering'.

I may be alone in thinking this but the real translation of those three little words means packing up all your household duties and transporting them hundreds of miles to an unfamiliar and usually very hot kitchen, then multiply any of the normal difficulties you face in day to day shopping by fifty and then add things like ants, the odd cockroach, unfamiliar and often unreliable electricity supply and funny coloured water.

And that's not even counting a lack of basic items such as a sharp knife, no frying pan and a fridge the size of a shoe box. Nor all the rest of your duties such as bed making, washing clothes and dishes, tidying up and keeping the place passably clean.

And we should start with packing because it tends to be the woman who packs, doesn't it? At least it was in our house.

My husband's idea of packing was to pop his wallet into the inside pocket of his jacket just before leaving and even then on one occasion we had gone 50 miles into a holiday in the Lake District before he realised he hadn't got his jacket on. And where was it? Neatly laid across the wrought iron gate where he had put it while he locked the door. And who got the blame? Me, because I should have noticed he wasn't wearing it.

When you go on a self-catering holiday you should beware the words 'we might as well take as much with us as we can so we don't waste our holiday money.'

Essentially that means we use the housekeeping money instead and end up lugging suitcases full of foodstuffs.

And I speak as one who has carried a suitcase to Mallorca stuffed with frozen packets of best back bacon, ditto butter and ditto strong Cheddar cheese. Plus tins of Walls pork sausages, packets of tea bags, tomato ketchup and bottles of orange drink. The latter to a country where oranges were at that time literally two a penny.

You wouldn't think a person would want a full English breakfast when the temperature outside was close to 100 degrees would you?

But then you wouldn't think that same person would want a full roast dinner on a Sunday would you? Wrong on both counts.

I think I finally cracked when, after searching for a Spanish butcher, and they tend to be difficult to find, mastering the language barrier to obtain something that looked vaguely like a joint of pork, and cooking a meal on the minuscule cooker, someone said casually after clearing his plate 'next time you ought to remember to bring some lard, olive oil just isn't the same.'

Self-catering does mean you are free to 'do your own thing', or so the brochures say. Personally I'll give up doing my own thing in exchange for someone else doing the cooking ,washing up, cleaning, bed making and shopping.

Marginally worse than self-catering with family is self-catering with a group of friends because there's always going to be one person who doesn't pull his or her, usually her, weight.

She's the one who never seems to be around when the potatoes need peeling, the salad needs washing or the kitchen needs clearing.

She's usually lying down with a headache which clears a millisecond before the meal is ready but reappears when the plates are piled high in the sink.

All this can lead to a subdued atmosphere of resentment building up, not usually detected by the male half of the arrangement but only too familiar to the other females.

Going on holiday with friends is a gamble anyway. They may be fine in short doses for an evening out or coming round for a meal. In the somewhat closed atmosphere of a holiday apartment it may be a different story and you may discover that the habit of your husband's best mate at work, who you have met only three times before, of loudly passing wind and shouting 'there goes another one', gets a little bit tedious as the fortnight wears on.

I have to say self-catering holidays get better as the family grows up and helps out more, until that is you reach the impasse of teenagers who don't want to go on holiday with their parents at any price and hopefully suggest that they will be perfectly alright staying at home on their own.

'In your dream sunshines' you say, because of course you can read little minds already planning social functions of their own involving your self-catering accommodation and probably your drinks cabinet too.