We're not going abroad on holiday this year, and it's a great relief.

Much as I love the experience, the different light, the heat, the architecture, the food… one thing always blights foreign travel, and that's the flight there and back.

We've got used to it, the getting up at some ungodly hour, the airport parking that costs a Queen's ransom, the queuing in pens like battery animals, the lugging of luggage, the fiddling indignity of the security searches, the boredom of waiting in a concourse filled with tacky expensive goods, and finally the incarceration for hours in a metal tube, sitting trussed up in tiny seats and being sold inedible food.

We pay for being treated like cattle, and herded around for hours, and we mustn't grumble because the flight cost 4p, plus £90 in extra charges.

So it's nice to stay at home, have a trip or two on a train or a coach, without being told about safety exits and extortionately priced sandwiches and duty frees.