Who's The Daddy: Life doesn’t seem real when you are away on holiday

After a week or so of lounging around in the sunshine, eating and drinking what you want and having it brought to your table by an exhausted waitress you swore you saw at breakfast but here she is serving dinner, you’re more divorced from reality than the candidates in the Conservative leadership election.If you remember nothing else, scorch these words on your soul in letters of fire. Always, always, always tip your wait staff. Like John Lydon said, you’re holidaying in other people’s misery. They work like dogs for hours every day, fetching and carrying after you. The least you can do in return is be polite and tip outrageously.Time really is elastic while you’re away. You’re vaguely aware real life is going on in the background but you’re so relaxed/drunk that you couldn’t care less, sometimes even struggling to recall the names of your own pets.There are a few things to be wary of though, particularly if you’ve been on an all inclusive and plan on travelling back home in the same jeans you wore on the flight out two weeks previously.When you checked in, you might have been under the misguided impression you had the physique of a lean Andrew Flintoff. But after a fortnight of stuffing your face like a foie gras goose and moving around less than a battery hen, you look more like James Corden.Suntans. While you might get a temporary ego boost on your return when popping to the shops for bread and milk and your neighbour hoots, “Look at the colour of you!”, in reality you’ve spent two weeks sprawled out on a horizontal deck chair, crisping up your skin like a barbecued sausage.Every summer there’s a lot of hoo-ha in the papers about getting “bikini body ready”. As a dear departed colleague used to say, “It’s all b*****ks”. You could have a body like a space hopper on two breadsticks or the chiselled torso of a lingerie model, no one gives two hoots.To get yourself bikini body ready, whatever the fudge that means, buy a bikini and put it on.

There, you’re ready.And then there’s the money.

Foreign currency often looks like the toy banknotes we used to buy our kids from the Early Learning Centre when they were little, that I dropped in collection envelopes when a colleague I didn’t like was leaving - but it is real.