THE MONARCH’S summer holiday has provoked a lot of sniggering, as she re-creates the glory days of the Royal Yacht by hiring a ship and donning a stout headscarf to brave drizzle and midges in the Hebrides with innumerable members of her extended family. One paper was beside itself with gleeful Schadenfreude:

“If you’re dreading YOUR family holiday, spare a thought for the Queen — cooped up on a converted car ferry with her feuding children, stroppy husband and a daughter-in-law hating every minute . . .” It went on to quote unnamed “crew members” of the ship giggling about the royal demand for Sandwich Spread and “wondering if she’ll bring her Tupperware containers of breakfast cereal” as the corgis “yap about”. An alleged “royal source” predicts ructions as the Princess Royal counts lighthouses, a jaded Camilla pops on deck in lashing rain for a quick fag and tension mounts because “Anne hates Camilla and Camilla hates the Wessexes”.

Well, the Windsors are easy to mock, especially if you’re a bit spiteful and short of ideas. And although The Hebridean Princess is a perfectly decent-looking little ship, it is true that she has served as a CalMac car ferry in her day, and that the hardworking Latvian crew may not quite match the comfortingly retro smoothness of manner that One was used to on Britannia. But to me there is something admirable about an octogenarian Queen — deprived of her yacht by a sullen Government that prefers to keep luxurious perks for its own apparatchiks — ingeniously finding another way of visiting the lone shielings of the misty islands.

What I take issue with mostly, however, is the underlying asssumption — repeated in endless jokey summer columns — that family holidays are hell. They’re an ordeal, say the sneerers; nobody wants to be cooped up with their family in a strange place; the Queen’s cruise is doomed by “the terrible mistake of inviting her family to share it with her”. There is a hackneyed, joyless view abroad that the only sort of hols worth having are spent with gangs of carefree boozy singletons, or else claustrophobically à deux in repetitive honeymoon paradises. Family holidays, to these glumpots, mean carsickness and compromise, rows and nappy-bags, sullen teenagers and husbands with the hump. The only bearable trips are those which offer the option of locking the children into Kiddy Klubs 12 hours a day while Mum and Dad pretend to be Bardot and Vadim on the beach or the casino.

Time to blow that one away, I think. This year of all years I have a personal message to deliver, to all who have ears to hear and sunhats to pull over them. It is this: family holidays are great. Family holidays are indispensable. They are the stuff of life, they should go on as long as possible, and their blemishes do not matter.

Let’s hear it, loud and raucous, for the great tribal migrations of the summer — whether in a coach to Pontin’s, a jumbo to Bali or a freebie Blairoplane to Uncle Silvio’s. For richer for poorer, in carsickness and in health, family holidays rock. The money you spend — whether the Queen’s £125,000 for a whole ship or a hard-saved £89 a head for a low- season week at Minehead — is money you will never regret. The frills — scuba lessons, camel rides, gondolas, terrifying rafting trips — may make your teeth rattle a bit at the moment of paying but will grow in golden memory, weaving brighter threads into the fabric of daily life thereafter. Even the worst bits spawn deathless family jokes (who can ever forget Father dropping a bottle of mineral water from the top bunk of the Venice sleeper and soaking a nervous young couple below, while his children watched entranced from the intervening bunks?). The bigger the tribal group on the move, the better; but even the smallest nuclear family needs to go through the travails and discoveries of holiday life, standing together against a baffling world (“¿Puede er, thingummy, um, garaje? Automobila, um, overheated . . .”).

As I say, my message today comes heartfelt and personal. A month ago our son’s death marked the end of 22 years as a family of four. We continue as a smaller unit and part of a wider tribe, but a phase of our history is over. And while routine memories are all very well, the ones that sustain us best through the darkness are the dozens of journeys, expeditions, skives, weekends, ferries, trains, planes, boats and adventures we somehow fitted in. In our particular situation there have already been crass demands that we draw some public moral from our loss, some banality about treatment of depression or the difficulties of young men. None of us feels inclined to do so, the personal character and circumstances involved being too complex, rich and strange for facile conclusions. But we do get asked if there is any lesson the tragedy has taught us, and there is.

Take family holidays! Take them now. Splash out. Forget the new car, sofa, autumn wardrobe — do a Grand Tour instead, together. And if you’ve any money left over, send it to the Family Holiday Association, which organises trips for the poorest and most hard-pressed of our fellow citizens, because they need the break and the memories just as much, and lasting joy can flow from a week in a caravan at Rhyl.

Go on. You know it makes sense. Gather up the family and get on the road. Tell Lolita and Kevin they can only go to Magaluf with their mates if they keep back a week later for a bracing family trip. The rows and compromises are part of it, and the rewards perennial.

So the Queen, as usual, knows what she’s doing. If a corgi does sick up its Sandwich Spread on Camilla’s secret stash of cigarettes when the ship hits a freak wave off Loch Horrible, it will bind them all ever closer, and arm them more strongly against disaster. This I know.

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