This was the big carbon effort summer, 2008, the year I attempted to make my family footprint as neutral as possible. What a mistake.

Like many pale parents now stalking the playgrounds across the country, grumbling under their hooded macs and avoiding each other’s eyes, a collective Seasonal Adjustment Disorder has descended.

Let’s face it, even that annual vacant promise of an “Indian Summer” is not going to happen, with most of Wales under water and rivers breaking their banks, and nobody is fooling themselves that Autumn leaves aren’t falling in the high winds.

Like many mothers who congratulated each other in the playground on our decision not to take a plane with our kids this year, Devon/Cornwall/Yorkshire just did not cut it. However many sticks of rock you throw at the problem, it is the parents – not the children – who suffer on the Great British Holiday.

We need that all-important sunshine to buoy us up for the rest of the year, and if we don’t get it, the vitamin D deficiency turns us into humourless monsters. Those same playground parents who were smiling at each other optimistically at the end of last term, promising playdates way back in July, are now avoiding each other in September lest they get stuck inside for another day with someone else’s kids playing “it” over their sitting room sofas.

The alternative is wet, muddy infants slipping on the grass and demanding constant clothes changes at the door. By early August most of us were feeling like a bad Persil advert.

However much our tourist board trumpets our national treasures to visitors (and family friends who live in Spain adore the British rain in August), after weeks of lugging your children around to another rainy ruin, you are ready to throw yourself off the turret.

What us carbon-conscious parents forgot in our rush to drive to Northern France - and not fly to Spain - was how badly the sun fulfils the promise of satisfying all five senses. Nothing else will do. Slathering on sun cream and exposing your feet to warm sand is a form of self love, swimming because you are too hot to do anything else makes you feel alive, the hairdryer heat as you wind down the window in your hire car blasts out wintry cobwebs; without these summer memories, I am mildly depressed.

The talk at the school gates is all about half term, and where the desperately pale can sneak off to for some late sun.

Credit crunch and carbon neutral be damned.

Watch the dark glasses at easyJet gates as Guardian readers dump their principles in the recycling bins and opt for good mental health. I’ll be the one with the Speedy Boarding pass elbowing the kids out of the way.

Times recommends

• Bogus websites are conning hundreds out of their holidays
• The complete last minute holiday guide
• Croatia: the flashing blades of Korkcula