Sunday Herald, The: Enjoy a relaxing holiday: don't go anywhere VICKY ALLAN argues that

JUST over two weeks ago a friend's parents were due to fly to South Africa. The flight was cancelled, their holiday postponed and they returned home wearied, worn and irritable. An argument over a petty family matter followed, emotional daggers were drawn, and everyone retired to bed not talking to each other.

My friend's mother did not emerge from her bedroom the following day or the next.

She had a migraine, said one family member. She was upset about the family dispute, said another. But the truth was far more straightforward and familiar. The annual "leave clock" was ticking. Hours of sacred holiday were passing in tiresome bedridden limbo.

The dream of a perfect South African getaway from everyday inconvenience and drudgery had already been rudely punctured. There is, fate seemed to be saying, no escape.

At least they weren't waiting in the airport lounge, like the holidaymakers delayed by last week's British Airways strikes. When BA staff went on an unofficial strike in sympathy with their beleaguered colleagues at catering company Gate Gourmet thousands of summer holiday bubbles burst before the trips had even begun. On Friday 70,000 people were prevented from travel. Some 1600 were left to loll about in the airport overnight. The mood is clear from the photographs: gloom and end-of-the-world despondency.

We have all been there, caught off-guard by a delay, stranded in the no-man's land of the departure lounge. The places designed for waiting often seem the worst places for waiting. It seems almost the more effort that has been applied to making airports alluring and comforting places for the big wait, the more purgatorial they have become.

Like distilled versions of the High Street Anywhere world we are trying to escape, they are filled with WH Smiths stores, Accesorize outlets and Pret a Manger franchises. The departure lounge, with its pre-boarding security checks, seems like a luxury penitentiary, a place in which you must do time, pay for your imminent pleasure.

We can all sympathise with the stranded. The dashing of their holiday hopes and dreams is familiar. In Britain, we are work/life balance extremists: swooping between polar existences of work and holiday. We have the shortest holiday entitlement in the EU, and seem to covet and holiday more than any other country, building our lives around these treasured days.

The flight is a key element in the fantasy. To really holiday no other form of transport will suffice. Perhaps it's because we live on an island, but it's said we have the greatest national propensity to fly. In 1970 British airports were used by 32 million people; last year 216 million passed through their lounges.

Year on year, ever more airports open, more cheap airlines set, more flight routes become available, more delays, more lost luggage and more disappointments. It's as if the flight is some imaginary wormhole leading to an alternate universe. Taking off, we like to think, we leave our ordinary lives on the runway - except of course we don't.

We all know that holidays too often disappoint, that the beaches are never as clean as we expect, the service rarely as obliging, the beds never quite soft enough, the sun often too hot, and that the bigger the dream, the wilder the plan, the more likely it is to founder.

Almost everyone has a holiday horror story: whether it's the hotel theft, the holiday belly, the sunstroke or the unappetising food. There's the illness that sets in as soon as your body is freed of work's adrenalin grip. Just yesterday a taxi driver told me that he had just come back from a trip on which he and his wife, both run down by the stress of work and family problems, had come down with a chest infection.

Holidaying is, of course, an aspirational consumer activity. Each year it seems we plan ever grander, ever bigger escapes from our humdrum yet rattled working lives. Just for a few weeks, we think, we can live how we really want. A holiday can be a solution to almost anything.

When I plan a trip I dream of all kinds of things: adventure, relaxation, a full stop in the rapid flow of time, learning Spanish in 14 days, in the dark with swarthy strangers, plump flavoursome tomatoes, early nights, late nights, finding myself in a rockpool. The holiday is where you break all the rules: forsake the diet, have a late night fumble with someone you shouldn't, gamble your savings on a roulette table.

But what are we ultimately hoping to bring back from a holiday? Partly, given we know we are going to return, and that few of us ever book a one-way flight to a new life, it is rejuvenation. Yet a recent survey found that nearly two-thirds of respondents found the "post-holiday glow" disappeared within 24 hours. Try as we might to hold on to whatever we got, the "real world" takes over.

My friend's mother finally emerged from her bedroom. Another day passed and she started to potter around. Then, on day five, she found herself sitting in the garden with a book and thinking that maybe, after all, this was the holiday she should have had from the start.

It reminded me of an unplanned holiday I had on my sofa earlier this year.

Following a car accident, I was forced to cancel a back-packing trip to Azerbaijan. A friend and I had planned it over months, fantasised over the train ride to Baku, the caravanserai, the Jeep trip. Then on Woodlands Road in Glasgow one car ploughed into the side of another and it seemed, for the moment, too much of a challenge.

Neighbours came round and cleaned my flat. Friends brought strawberries and cream. Life really did stop in a way it doesn't when you are working.

My sofa brought all the best elements of holiday. And not an Accesorize outlet or Costa in sight.

Muriel Gray is away