If you’ve managed to book a family holiday this summer without taking out a second mortgage, congratulations.
You are either a financial genius, won the lottery, or have discovered a travel website the rest of Britain doesn’t know about.
For everyone else, the annual school holiday getaway has become less of a break and more of an extreme financial endurance event.
Parents still dream of sunshine, sea views and a week without hearing the words, “What’s for tea?” every 20 minutes.
The children, meanwhile, simply want reliable Wi-Fi and a pool big enough to film questionable TikTok dances.
Then, reality arrives!
Flights mysteriously triple in price the moment schools break up, hotels suddenly believe they’re five-star palaces, and a caravan in North Wales starts costing about the same as a small apartment in Monaco.
Travel companies insist it’s all down to ‘high demand’.
Families have another description for it, but it isn’t suitable for publication in a family newspaper.
With household budgets already stretched tighter than an airline seatbelt in economy, many parents are abandoning dreams of the Costa del Sol in favour of the Costa del Shed.
Why spend thousands on a Mediterranean resort when the back garden offers all the essentials?
There’s sunshine, occasionally, a paddling pool that deflates every afternoon, and the neighbour firing up the lawnmower precisely as you sit down with a cold drink. Authentic British holiday ambience.
Older readers may remember when summer holidays meant squeezing the family into a slightly damp caravan in Porthcawl or Barry Island. Luxury meant having a kettle that worked.
The toilet block was somewhere over the horizon, the showers alternated between Arctic and volcanic, and fetching fresh water involved carrying a container roughly the size of a small oil drum across the campsite.
Nobody complained because, frankly, everyone else was doing exactly the same thing.
Children entertained themselves with football, buckets, spades and arguments over whose turn it was to hold the torch during the midnight toilet expedition.
These days, if the holiday accommodation doesn’t have fibre broadband, a hot tub and an air fryer, there’s every chance someone will leave a one-star review entitled ’Worst experience ever’.
Of course, the great irony is that the moments families remember rarely involve expensive resorts.
It’s the burnt burgers on a disposable barbecue, the tent collapsing at 2am, Dad insisting he can assemble camping chairs without instructions, and Mam discovering she’d packed everything except the toothpaste.
Those stories become family legends. Nobody ever reminisces fondly about paying £8 for an airport bottle of water.
So, perhaps this summer, if foreign beaches are beyond the budget, don’t despair.
Fill the paddling pool, fire up the barbecue, chase the wasps away from the sausages and let the children loose with a garden hose.
With a bit of imagination, the back garden can become the Algarve, albeit with more drizzle, fewer palm trees and Dave next door asking if anyone’s seen his hedge trimmer.
At least the journey home won’t involve a delayed flight, lost luggage or a four-hour queue at passport control.
And that’s got to be worth something.