Apart from moving home, getting divorced, suffering bereavement or getting the sack, going on holiday is one of the most stressful experiences going.
The reasons for this are all too clear. In the days leading up to "the big off" diligent employees work themselves into the ground, ensuring their workload is covered in their absence, the dedicated and naïve believing they are somehow irreplaceable.
Then there are the stresses about paying for the holiday. Even before you close the front door behind you and bid adios to Blighty, the credit card has already taken a hammering. There is the purchase of airline tickets, ferry crossings, travel insurance, villa/tent/hotel accommodation, sun cream, contraceptives, new Speedos, diarrhoea tablets, midgie repellent ... it all adds up very quickly.
Add to this the prospect of being cooped up at close quarters with spouses and civil partners, children, children's friends and, as is becoming increasingly popular, in-laws.
Amid the hurly-burly of the holiday countdown there is, thankfully, one task that is guaranteed to lower adrenaline levels and foster a general sense of well-being. Just turn off the pager and the mobile phone, take a deep breath and walk inside a bookshop.
Choosing a rollicking good holiday read is a sure-fire way of banishing negative thoughts about pending mid-September penury. It may even stop you worrying if smarmy Gavin's presentation for the senior management team - the one you were meant to be giving but can't because you're stuck on a fly-blown beach in the Aegean - will be better than yours last year.
For now, indulge yourself in the joys of fiction. Unless you have very young children, in which case there's no point in reading on because you are already stuffed, the summer holiday is the one time in the year you can be assured of time to relax with a book.
Non-fiction doesn't do the trick. The only non-fiction material I take on holiday is a car magazine but this is strictly reserved for reading in the loo along with the local travel guides.
A good book comes to define a good holiday. Updike's Rabbit series will always remind me of lazy, pre-fatherhood days on a Greek island when I got prickly heat; Steinbeck's East Of Eden is evocative of a washout camping holiday in France when it didn't stop raining.
It is also tremendously good fun to look at the poor book choices made by those holiday-makers idling on nearby sun beds. Remember all those people of summers past, bathed in sweat and Hawaiian Tropic, thumbing through The Da Vinci Code, Bridget Jones's Diary and Man And Boy? (I know, reading Tony Parsons, in public. Imagine.) Plebs.
Then there are the Harry Potter saddos - not the children, their parents, who will be out in force again this month. Please, somebody tell them. It's just not right. There is nothing alternative, endearing, subversive or remotely clever about reading kids' wizard books. And don't fall for the "but they're just great reads" argument. If they were great reads, they would get on adult book award nomination lists, somewhere; and they don't, not even in Redditch.
So here's what will I be reading and I like to think it is a balanced list: a Michael Connolly thriller (to scare myself); The French Lieutenant's Woman (to up my quota of modern-ish classics); Sarah Water's Night Watch (because it's about the war - I only learned later that it features lesbian sex); and Charles Dickens's Hard Times (because a holiday without Dickens is not a holiday).
Crucially, Hard Times will serve a double purpose, preparing me for the prospect of coming home.