I used to pity those separated fathers with their children, eating their joyless, anxious meals at Pizza Express

it's holiday time again. Having invented the staycation - no, I don't like the word either - four years ago when we ran out of money and out of patience with French traffic, we are sticking to principle and, as we did four months ago, hanging out at Tom Hodgkinson's gaff in north Devon. I wrote about our previous holiday in these pages so will not repeat myself, except to remind you of the fauna we have to look after: pony, cats, chickens, bees and now ferrets, which are like draught-excluders with legs and are the devil to catch.

One thing I didn't mention is that the place we are staying in has its own microclimate, whose significant characteristic can be summed up by the word "rain". I know it is a trope from which all comedy was finally extracted about 50 years ago, but the rain-lashed British holiday is something we are getting to be quite expert at. (How well I remember the sodden family holidays in Cornwall, where every year, after a pre-motorway nine-hour drive, we'd watch my father stomping round a launderette, whose windows were steamed up, it seemed, by his own fury, saying the words "never again" like a mantra. Happy days.) So perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised at how well (relatively) a 12- and a nine-year-old boy can behave when confined indoors with only one parent - but, really, I am.

Some years ago I used to write a column for the Guardian called "Slack Dad" (the phrase is mine but has since been pinched by other, more shameless columnists), the premise of which, as you might be able to work out for yourself, was a very hands-off approach to fatherhood. Miraculously, it seems to have worked. I know there are few things more rebarbative than parents who insist, usually against all the evidence, that their children are the bees' knees, but something seems to have turned out fine. All right, it's not all rosy in the garden. The youngest, whose likeness you will find against the word "contrary" in all good illustrated dictionaries, has been winding us up all summer by announcing that he is supporting Australia in the Ashes. This has placed me in a painful predicament, as I believe that an Englishman has no higher purpose in life than to make an Australian cricket fan miserable.

But the atmosphere has largely been wonderful. May I suggest, once more, that this has something to do with being separated from the mother hen? Family holidays under identical conditions with Mrs Lezard used to be testing occasions. There is, and I do not mean to be sexist about this, a certain kind of matriarch who is not happy unless the family unit is Doing Something. Holidays become a nightmarish inversion of the ideal. You know, the concept of the vacation as a period in which one relaxes. Instead there were excursions. A trip to the beach would become so stressful that I wonder if it didn't take as many years off my life as smoking 40 untipped fags a day for 40 years.

Even now the estranged wife tries to muscle in with suggestions. "Don't forget the bodyboards and wetsuits for surfing off Ilfracombe," she says. About 70 miles down the M4 I mention to the boys that I have forgotten the bodyboards and wetsuits. "Good," they say. And have you noticed how much less packing a motherless family generates? In the old days, the car, by no means small, would be so crammed with luggage and whatnot that the rear-view mirror became a useless frippery. Nowadays it's three small bags, a road map, a cricket bat, a couple of balls, a bag of sandwiches, a tube of fruit gums and a bottle of water, and we're off. This time we even had space to bring along the eldest's guitar and amplifier, and could have fitted in a pool table had we so wished.

I used to see them the way we used to see lepers, the separated fathers with their children, eating their joyless, anxious meals at Pizza Express
(I have a hunch that, were divorce made illegal, Pizza Express would probably go under). Their misery seemed palpable, contagious, a place of terror and retribution. Fly straight, I would say to myself, or you will end up like that, ruefully contemplating the days of security and happiness. One would also worry as much about the effect on the children as on oneself. Not only will one have to stump up for university fees when they are older, there will be endless psychiatrists' sessions to pay for. (You can't expect your offspring to pay for them if they're your
own fault, can you?)

But, as I said, the children are giving every indication of being well adjusted. OK, so there's the one who supports the Aussies even when given the opportunity, around teatime on the fourth day of the Oval Test, to become an Englishman again. It is, I suppose, a heavy price to pay; but there are, it has to be admitted, heavier ones.

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