Long weekends at festivals, short weeks at home, all summer long: now that is surely preferable to the immense cost and headache of the nuclear family holiday in the sun?

Festivals are fun for kids, fun for parents and offer a welcome break from the stresses of the nuclear family. The sheer quantities of people make life easier: loads of adults for the adults to talk to and loads of kids for the kids to play with.

If the weekend ain't long; its too short

My idea of childcare at festivals is to sit at a trestle table with an ale while the kids run around and make up their own games.

Now I'm no biologist, but it seems to make a lot of sense that slow lives, as well as being enjoyable, are long lives. One only has to think of the example of the tortoise for proof of this theory from the animal world.

Surely, anyway, a working day of eight or nine hours which is not split by a nap is simply too much for a human being to take, day in, day out, and particularly so in hot weather.