HOLIDAYS are bad for you, (mothers might have already noticed that). According to Relate, which used to be called Marriage Guidance, most of the planning, organisation, stopping the papers, checking the tickets and getting the packing done falls to the woman of the household.

So she invariably starts off tired and frazzled and still worrying whether she's switched the oven off. And that's even before the traditional four hour delay at the airport.

For a lot of families, holidays are about the only time of the year they are together, all day. It takes a bit of getting used to. Husbands and wives have to talk to each other, fathers get to know children, mothers act as buffer zones.

Parents want to stay up late drinking and making the most of not having to go to work the next day, but children want to savour each golden moment, ideally from dawn.

Holiday cottages are not real holidays for mothers, but without the buffer of daily tasks, many families realise there's nothing there. What a depressing discovery - to find that it's only the washing up and the school run that's keeping you together.

No wonder divorces peak after holiday times.

Then there's the problem of the couple - where one wants to lie on the beach and the other wants to DO things. They might agree a happy compromise, of course. On the other hand.

And even if everything is perfect, it takes time to unwind, to get over the jet lag or journey, to stock up on the things you've forgotten, to find the best bar, a good restaurant.

Then suddenly it all works. Your body clock slows down. You find a rhythm of holiday life, you all relax, discover that actually you quite like your family. You have things to talk about, you're an old hand at the place now, know your way around and pity the new arrivals. You daydream about living there. Then it's time to go home. Time to sit in the airport again, or in a motorway traffic jam. And the children are scratchy and miss their new friends and the grown ups think of how much it all cost and the bills that are waiting for them. The trouble with coming back from holiday, is that you need another holiday to get over it. Enjoy your hols...

PUBLISHING photographs of known paedophiles is a mistake - the first step on the road to lynch mobs. Of course, it's understandable. Sarah Payne's death touched us all. We all fear for our children and for others. But whipping up hysteria is not the way to deal with it.

If anyone had harmed my children all I would have asked for was an hour in a locked room with the person who did it. No matter how big or strong or evil he might be, a mother's fury would have been even stronger - enough to do him a great deal of damage, preferably long, lingering and fatal.

But it's precisely because ordinary people feel like that, that we cannot leave justice to them. It's why we have laws, rules, frameworks, procedures. In fury and stress, it's very easy for mistakes to be made. An angry mob, burning with self-righteousness, is not a rational being. Of course we have to protect our children, and somehow we have to deal with paedophiles - by tagging them, locking them up, banishing them or even hanging them.

But publishing their pictures in the interest of public safety is not the way.

Incidentally, keeping children at home isn't always the safest option either.

As we've seen again, tragically this week, the overwhelming majority of murdered children are killed, not by strangers, but by members of their own family - mother, father, stepfather or mother's boyfriend.

Instead of gazing in fear at newspaper pictures, maybe we should just look across the breakfast table.

OH COME on, are you that feeble that you haven't yet worked out a kilo is just over two pounds? In returning to pounds and ounces, Tesco is making a great leap backwards. What's worse, it's causing just the considerable confusion it claims to be trying to avoid.

Our children automatically think metric. Even die-hards must have worked out how long the 200m race is. And we no longer buy our coal in chaldrons. Travellers who can get to grips with fluctuating currency exchanges within hours of hitting the bars on the Costas can surely cope with buying ham by the 100grams instead of the quarter.

To do anything else is either deliberate obtuseness or pathetic sentimentality.

Our ways of measuring things have been changing for centuries, ever since Henry I decided a yard should be the length of his arm. Pounds and feet, inches and miles have all shrunk and stretched and shrunk again.

Measurements are not sacred. We've got rid of them before.

Let's see - if an inch equals three barleycorns and the rod, pole or perch is five and a half yards and the acre is a piece of ground 40 perches by one chain, then that means an acre is about 19 million barleycorns.

Still find metric tricky?

PRINCES William and Harry are apparently having a great time in the upper class surf haven of Rock, down in Cornwall. They're chilling out with friends and pretty girls and, William at least, is going to the pub with great cheerful gangs.

For a couple of Etonian school boys it's an ordinary sort of summer. Compare it with how Prince Charles spent his teenage years, pretty much on his own, mooching round Balmoral, and you can't help thinking that the young princes have a much better chance of turning into normal human beings.

In which case, their father might have got something right after all.