HEY-HO , hey-ho, on holiday we go ... or something like that. Yes, it's that half-way through the year time again when I usually call a halt to the proceedings (work that is) and respond instead to the lure of sunny beaches, blue seas and cloudless skies. Yes, that's right I stay in Brighton.

But not this year, this year I am going AWAY, far, far away. I ought to be excited, I ought to be rarin' to go. Instead I'm wilting like an unwatered geranium.

Going on holiday is such a hassle. You have to cancel things, turn other things off, remind relatives where your will's kept and, worse than anything else, pack.

Aweek before you go the chorus starts: "Have you packed then ...?" It's the assumption that normal life ceases once the plane tickets are in your hand, so that evenings usually spent watching TV, at the cinema, or in the pub are replaced by Seven Days With A Suitcase, a drama of travelling folk.

You can see it now: "Here is the story of a woman who planned to knock 'em dead, who arrived in a foreign land with clothes that shed their creases as if by magic and transformed her into an exotic creature who beguiled the natives with her polyester bikini and drip dry undies..."

Or perhaps a more realistic documentary: "Here is the story of a woman who spent two entire evenings ironing and folding and getting into a right state, who arrived in a foreign land to find the airline had lost her suitcase and all she had was a hairbrush and the knickers she stood up in."

However well I pack (and my packing skills are pathetic) I still emerge looking like someone who has not only slept rough but lived rough for most of her life.

Iam, unfortunately, a wrinkly. Give me a skirt, a jacket and a freshly pressed blouse and watch them collapse and lose their shape as they attempt to conceal mine. I crease, therefore I am.

Ionce travelled long haul with a friend who, anxious to be "upgraded" from economy to business class, cast despairing eyes over me, sighed, and told me to stand well behind her with just my face showing. Any part of me seen below the neck would blow our chances she reckoned.

But at least I travel light. One suitcase plus one piece of hand luggage, small hand luggage. I'm always astonished at what other travellers, who must have hands the size of King Kong's, consider to be "hand" luggage.

Which brings me to a very true story, which no one ever believes is true.

Some years ago, a friend was on a flight from a country that shall be nameless (for reasons of political correctness). He saw a small male passenger struggling to push an obviously heavy and tightly-packed plastic suit hanger into an overhead locker.

He went to help and gave the recalcitrant luggage a push. To his horror he found himself holding a hand. His shouts brought flight attendants who unzipped the suit hanger and discovered an elderly woman's body. The small passenger had been taking his recently deceased mother home for burial and was quite unaware that he was doing anything wrong.

"And do you know," said my friend, "they put her in the hold and didn't even charge him for having excess baggage..."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.