Granted, it’s never been cheaper to go abroad. And, sometimes, go abroad you must - it wouldn’t do at all to become all weird and insular and turn into one of those people, like a sometime relative, who once literally wept with disgust at the idea that people might want to go to horrid fancy foreign France in the summer when the bounty of 1970s Britain was on their own doorstep.

Nevertheless, I have become quite passionate about holidaying in the UK. To be honest, this doesn’t really have as much to do with my concerns about my family’s carbon footprint as with expense and convenience.

If you’re a single person with a decent income, or a couple, the world is your oyster and travelling is usually straightforward and manageable.

If you have small children in tow, though (to say nothing of a neurotic dog that needs parking somewhere), the whole thing can quickly become a particularly stressful way of leaching money. To make matters worse, you sometimes get the sinking feeling that the fun doesn’t seem worth the cost.

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The problem is partly that an adult’s idea of a blissful holiday abroad seldom coincides with a child’s. Say that I want to lounge scenically around Tuscany (just to be especially clichédly middle-class about it). I rent, at vast expense, a villa to lounge in. It’s really nice for me - I like the food, I love the heat, I like Giotto, I love churches, I speak Italian, I like swimming and lying in the sun, and not having a telly is my idea of heaven.

For my children, only two of those pronouncements are true - those concerning food and swimming. The rest bores them to tears. And, as I have discovered over the years, there’s only so much swimming you can reasonably expect a child to do in a fortnight. The pool is enormously exciting for the first three days, after which you find children in various stages of mild disenchantment (which immediately puts you in a filthy mood - what kind of hideous brats have you raised that they turn their noses up at pools and olive groves?).

Why don’t you go for a swim, you say, slightly aggressively. I swam all morning, they say, and now there’s nothing to do. Go for a walk. No, it’s too hot. Also, I’m 15. I don’t want to walk through the countryside looking at flippin’ trees. Well, do something, you roar. We haven’t come all the way out here and practically bankrupted ourselves for you to lie around like a slob.

And no, you can’t play Game Boy. You play Game Boy in London. We are on holiday. It is special.

Meanwhile, the baby has got a rash and you’re wondering if she has heatstroke, despite spending the day unhappily smothered in a thick coating of factor 50 (she’s fractious anyway, because she didn’t sleep last night, because it was too hot), and the middle one’s been stung by one of the many wasps that congregate at mealtimes in the charming outdoor loggia. Never mind, you explain, because this afternoon we’re all going to climb a clock tower. We’ll have an amazing view of the whole of Siena. And later I’m going to drag you all around town, in the broiling heat, until we find a church I went to when I was 12, which contains an especially interesting relic. It’ll be such fun!

Or not. Deciding to give British holidays a whirl was the best decision I ever made. It saved me thousands of pounds, but even more important, it provided us with holidays we could all enjoy. Nobody has to be at Heathrow at an ungodly hour, in horrible crowds, to find delays and disgusting breakfasts that cost a tenner a head and are swimming in grease. Nobody screams throughout the flight because their ears aren’t popping. Nobody has difficulty finding the car-hire place, then gets lost for four hours finding the villa. And that’s just for starters.

Instead, you just get in your car and go. You stop off at a nice family-friendly pub for lunch. You take your time. You arrive, and everything’s exciting but not too unfamiliar. The sea is turquoise. The sun is shining - and if not, it will at some point. The beach is huge and pristine.

The fish tastes as if it walked out of the sea 10 minutes beforehand and the chips are crispy. The children aren’t forced to bob about in a pool for a fortnight: they can bodyboard, they can surf, they can fish, they can go on boat trips, they can look for seals, they can go crabbing. The big ones can go off by themselves and explore the nearest town, the little ones can check out the rock pools. In the evenings, the big ones can hang out with other teenagers while you put the baby to bed, pour yourself a glass of wine and admire the sunset. It is bliss.

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