The Pope does it. Tony Blair does it. George Bush does it more often than most. So should we. Take proper holidays, that is.

APPARENTLY, an amazing number of us don't take the holidays we are entitled to. Instead of sunning ourselves on a beach, or sightseeing, lying late in bed or even just sitting round at home putting our feet up, we'd rather be in the office, factory, shop, or wherever, working.

Are we mad?

Holidays aren't just good for you. They are essential. We need time to chill, think or let our minds become a blissful blank. We need to be with our families without the constraint to time and routine.

Time to understand what it is we spend the rest of the year working for.

Look, if Victorian industrialists hadn't realised that we all work better after a break, they would never have given the workers holidays. When it comes to bosses, self-interest rules.

Even pit ponies had their week in the sun. So get yours.

According to a new survey, a third of managers don't take their full holidays. Others are so paranoid that, if they do go away, they are so anxious to keep in touch that they ring in from the beach.

Madness.

Which is why the best place to go on holiday are the places that mobiles don't reach. Though once, in the wilds of Pembrokeshire, an anxious editor eventually managed to track me down. She must have thought I sounded strange - but I was standing on top of a five bar gate on a cliff path, the only way I could get any sort of signal on my phone. Funnily enough, she hasn't asked me to do any work for her since.

We all need a break. If we don't get away, we need a change of routine, even if it's something as simple as sitting in the park in the sunshine.

Pope Benedict XVI - who is staying in a chalet in the Italian Alps, spending his time walking, playing the piano and writing - said that holidays "have become almost a necessity to recover in body and spirit". Sound man.

His idea of holiday fun might not be the same as yours or mine, but the message is the same.

None of us is indispensable. The world will turn quite happily once we are dead and gone, so it can certainly manage without us for a week or two. Even hamsters get off the treadmill occasionally, so make sure you get off yours.

And if you want any more justification, just think of our MPs. They will finish at the end of this week and won't go back to work until after the party conferences - on October 10. That's nearly three months.

We might have only a few weeks, so even more reason to make the most of them. Enjoy your holiday.

A STRANGE unnatural silence fills the house. For the first time in over a year, we have the place to ourselves.

Both boys have left the country. One is job hunting in Ibiza. The other was last heard of swimming in Lake Como before heading with his backpack into Eastern Europe.

Of course, I miss them dreadfully.

But gosh, the peace and quiet is wonderful.

WHEN a nine-year-old boy in Birmingham was impaled on his bike - the handlebar through his flesh - a group of youths gathered round. They blocked the path of the emergency services and didn't want to help - just to take photos with their mobile phones and send them to their mates.

Doesn't surprise me.

Nearly 40 years ago when the slag heap slid down the hillside in Aberfan to bury 116 children and five of their teachers in the village school, my cousin was one of the rescue workers. The site became an instant tourist attraction. Even as rescuers dug desperately through the filth, often with their bare hands, to try to find the bodies of the small children, onlookers flocked to the scene and sat gawping in their cars, eating their picnics as the tragedy unfolded in front of them.

Never underestimate the callous casual ghoulishness of the great British public. If they brought back public hangings, tickets would be snapped up and the roads chock full of traffic even before the judge took his black cap off.

SOMETIMES you can't help wondering... New research has shown that the Pill has been the greatest contribution to women's rights. Well, yes, of course. Once women could easily control how many children they had and when they had them, the world changed utterly.

It gave us our freedom. Above all, it gave us our financial freedom, which is the only true independence.

Workers' rights, equal pay, even easy divorce wouldn't have been much use to a Victorian mother with a typical family of a dozen children. But when there are only one or two children, or none at all, the picture is completely different.

As one of the Pill Generation from the 1960s, I couldn't have imagined my life without it, blessed its invention and would never have wanted to go back to life before it.

And yet... When most of us have only two children, when five is considered an enormous family, and ten worthy of a full page newspaper story, sometimes you can't help thinking what we've lost.

Yes, of course a life with a dozen kids would have been cramped and chaotic, noisy and poverty stricken and extremely limiting. But somewhere out there are the children who have never been born.

And sometimes, just sometimes, you can't help wondering what they might have been like.

MANY thanks to all those people who have written saying nice things about me. You are very kind. Let's just hope that now I don't go and mess it up...

Published: 20/07/2005