Most of my childhood holidays were staycations – and given how hit-and-miss foreign getaways can be, maybe that was for the best

In an age of Instagram, you’re only as interesting as your last holiday – and the pressure can be too much to bear

Some people are naturally good at going on holiday; espadrilles and battered holiday hats don’t make them look like pillocks. These are the types who visit places no-one’s heard of before they become hellholes, and return home buzzing with all the amazing adventures they’ve had. These are the people who actually see the waterfalls/Northern Lights/dolphins; who manage to time their trip to Japan to coincide with the explosion of pink cherry blossom in Maruyama Park.

Meanwhile, the rest of us spend a couple of weeks stuck to a plastic chair wondering whether it’s time for another microwaved cheese toastie.

I don’t come from a holiday-going family. Mine was not a childhood of Riviera villas or even package deals to Spain; we didn’t go skiing, and we never even visited our relatives in New Zealand. After a long career in the army, including a number of postings abroad, my father was done with foreign travel by the time he was in his forties. I remember a never-repeated family caravan holiday to the south of France; a holiday with the cousins in a Welsh farmhouse, where the highlight of the week was when a bat got into our bedroom. But apart from a couple of notable exceptions, we spent the holidays at home. I never felt particularly bothered by this – home was good fun. I lived in the Northern seaside town of Blackpool, its iconic lights twinkling just down the road and golden beach hidden under sewage. Who needed holidays, anyway?

Some of my friends would disappear for a couple of weeks during the summer break, returning to school with their backs scarlet and peeling. This was back in the seventies when we’d do anything for a tan, including basting ourselves in olive oil and stretching out on tin foil like so much pork belly. I also had friends who were meant to go on holiday but didn’t because back then, travel companies had a habit of going bust while the plane was on the tarmac. But mostly, my friends and I stayed home, spending our summers hanging out in the town square, smoking and snogging, perfectly content to be in Lancashire.

Times change, and no one stays at home anymore. After all, in an age of Instagram, you’re only as interesting as your last holiday. Now is the season to book one – it must be, because all the telly ads are telling us to get on with it.

Back in the day, this was the time of year when holiday brochures used to drop through your letterbox: big, thick catalogues brimming with identical white tower blocks overlooking kidney-shaped pools under blazing blue skies.

Making a choice back then was tricky enough – but with the internet, it’s almost impossible, particularly for someone like me with so little “holiday confidence”. I sit frozen in front of my screen for hours, wondering whether I should be doing a road trip down the coast of California, or nipping over to Florence for the weekend. I am crippled by choice, other people’s opinions (aka TripAdvisor) and the meanness from which many freelancers suffer: the agony of not knowing how much money you can really afford to spend when you can’t guarantee you’ll ever work again.

My jealousy of people who work in the same industry as me and get the telly travelogue gigs is overwhelming. When Sue Perkins did Japan for the BBC, I could barely watch it, such was the green haze in front of my eyeballs; ditto Monty Don casually strolling around the finest gardens the world has to offer.

These are the kind of holidays I want: organised by someone else, paid for by someone else, and with a s***-hot itinerary.

Holidays are so fraught with potential for disaster. Last year, my partner and I endured five nights of terrible food at our joyless posh Greek hotel, rather than upsetting them by bogging off down to the pizza joint down the road. By far my best recent trip was a three-day, full-board Christmas decoration beading course at the Women’s Institute’s Oxfordshire headquarters.

Most of us can only afford a couple of holidays a year and when the investment backfires, it can be gutting – so much so that I feel tempted to revert to my seventies self and spend the summer hanging out at home (only nowadays if the sun comes out, I’ll be diligently slathering myself in factor 50 instead of olive oil).