A wise man once said that on a journey, it is not where you go, but who you become that really matters. Aside from the fact that this reveals that he clearly left his wife — or, possibly, mum — in charge of small, “non-mattering” journey issues like tickets, accommodation, packing, researching which restaurants will accept a 6.30pm booking for a party with three children and an egg allergy, and where and when it would be expedient to stop and go to the toilet, it is obvious what journeys he really meant: holidays.

In the absence of partition and mass migration, they’re the only big journeys we ever undertake these days. The premise is that when we go on holiday, it should — if it’s a good holiday — change us a little. It should improve us. We should acquire both the reddened, sun-damaged complexion of a bumpkin and some knowledge. In short, we should return from our holidays cleverer.

Well I’m afraid that this is not a sentiment I can hold by. I don’t want to get cleverer on my holidays. I want to get stupider. Once I’m off the clock, I don’t want to have to think at all. If I have to have more than one thought a day — preferably the thought “Yes, I think I would like to eat a cheese sandwich in the bath, while reading Grazia” — then I have, clearly, failed to book the right holiday.

On the right holiday, nice things would just happen at me for six days, and on the seventh, I would be put into a coma, and posted back to London, first class.

By the time I come home, I want my brain to have totally calcified through extreme lack of use. I want to be as dumb as a bag of hair, covered in sand that I’m too listless and witless to brush off and so relaxed I stand in the middle of the front room, staring at my own feet and going “Wha?” for an hour and a half.

So you can imagine, then, my disappointment when I realised that, over the course of my summer holidays, I actually had learnt a few things. Thankfully, nearly all of them were stupid.

1. You can make a child climb a mountain if it thinks there’s a Disney Store at the top.
Obviously you can’t stand at the bottom of Stac Pollaidh and say outright: “There is a Disney Store at the top of that mountain. Those are not clouds up there — that is Disney Magic!” No — the trick is simply not say that there isn’t one up there. Imply that one would normally expect there to be one on top of a Highland mountain — but that the only way of really knowing is to spray that midge repellent all over your face, get your cag-in-a-bag on, and ship up 600m.

Of course, when you get to the top, and the kids wail: “But there is no Disney Store here!”, then you must bring in the second half of the Mountain Climbing For Recalcitrant Children Plan. You must say: “JESUS! It has CLOSED DOWN! This recession has hit the retail sector HARD!” Then re-motivate the children for the climb back down by not saying, but certainly kind of implying that there might be a fire-sale going on in the car-park below, with High School Musical figurines going half-price. But only if they hurry.

2. When it comes to sleeper-trains, there are two types of people in this world.
The first delight in the doll’s house-like neatness of the cabins. They adore the blankety bunk-beds, and are soothed into sleep by the night-long rattle of the locomotive’s trundle.

The second pull a cat’s bum mouth as soon as they step inside, spend all night sighing and ruin the morning croissant-in-a-bag breakfast by wailing: “That was like spending all night in the video to the Cure’s Close to Me! I am glad I am not going in one of those again, oh, I am, in seven days. Maybe I will mention how fatally dispirited I am about this EVERY TEN MINUTES FOR THE REST OF THE HOLIDAY.”

3. These days, everyone gets in trouble for smoking.
The last time I got caught having a sneaky fag by one of my kids, I was able to reply — with James Bond-like, ninja-swiftness — “This isn’t mine, darling! I’m just holding it for Uncle Nathan!” Unfortunately, when I repeated the manoeuvre this summer, I didn’t know that “Uncle Nathan” was supposed to have given up six months ago and that I’d just ratted him up in front of his kids. Who immediately started crying about him getting cancer, and wailing that they didn’t want to be half-orphans, and had to be placated with having virtually all of that day’s gin-fund spent on ice cream, and bubble-swords.

It looks like I’m going to have to revert to the excuse of their earlier years: “It’s not a cigarette, darlings — it’s Sooty’s wand! A naughty boy set fire to it, and mummy was trying to put it out.”

4. Scottish people do actually notice if you’re Scottish or not.
If you’re ludicrously impressionable/ borderline human clay/me, after a couple of hours in a region with a strong accent, it can be easy to catch yourself “being local”. You can convince yourself it’s both a friendly and a beautiful thing to start throwing in “lassie” here, and a “pet” there, and that the locals will presume that you talk like this all the time at home.

The reality is, of course, that they are thinking, “Why is this idiot moon-faced London woman talking like the Russ Abbot character C. U. Jimmy, the noo?” This August, I triumphantly smashed all my previous accent-slip records. Usually, it takes a couple of hours, and a couple of whiskies, for the idiomatic “monkey see, monkey do” reflex to kick in. This year, I got off the London-Edinburgh train at 8am, and walked over to the taxi-rank. “Taxi?” the driver said. “Aye,” I replied. My husband turned and walked away, mortified.

5. Foxes eschew boardgames.
If a 2am, alfresco game of Scrabble should end up being abandoned, due to excessive “wobbly tiredness”, do bring it back indoors again. Leaving it on the lawn is apparently some manner of provocation to urban foxes, who will snittishly do a plop on it — as if saying: “Here is my disdain for your dandy, self-satisfied middle-class, Viognier-fuelled word-games. And it’s on a double word score.”

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