There are three little words that strike horror into the heart of every parent of school-age children. They are the words that cause you to break out in a cold sweat or let out a moan in your sleep in the dead of night – even in the middle of winter. They are ‘school summer holidays’.

Hear those three words and you may very well envisage jubilant children spewing from the school gates and then remember the dim, distant sun-kissed summers of your own youth. But mention them within earshot of a parent of appropriately aged offspring and you’ll see the light go out in their eyes.

Oh yes, the kids are happy – just like the waving teachers who weep with joy to see their charges depart. But now it’s time for the parents to weep. Were you fortunate enough to be able to take the whole of the month of August off to ‘summer’ somewhere – perhaps a holiday home near Padstow in Cornwall or an Italianate villa in some dreamy olive-grove in Tuscany – then it would be a different story. Similarly, if you’re one of the privileged few who enjoy a ‘1950s settlement’ – where one spouse does not work (for money) – then I’m sure everything would be rosy or rather, rosé.

But if, like most of us, you are a ‘hard-working family’ as Gordon Brown liked to put it, then the six-week school summer holidays are a living hell, one which makes August feel like a Godot-esque month without end.

Six weeks. I would rather run the London marathon backwards dressed in a chicken suit in a heatwave than do it all again. And yet here it is.

For working parents this is the ultimate test in work-life-imbalance.........

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