Tony Blair's plan to interrupt his family holiday in Barbados this week to fly home to attend Lord Hutton's inquiry is bonkers. With the death of the Ministry of Defence scientist Dr David Kelly to explain and accusations of 'sexing up' the Iraq weapons of mass destruction dossier, the Prime Minister shouldn't be going on holiday at all. By trying to please everyone - his family and the public - he will hack everybody off.

He won't have a relaxing holiday (imagine the stuff churning around his brain as he tries to lie idle by the pool). Nor will his wife and four kids - can you imagine him being good company with all that on his mind? And voters will hate him for swanning off to Cliff Richard's Caribbean mansion in the middle of a crisis.

You see this all the time: people with high-flying jobs working on holiday. And the invention of mobiles, laptops and easy email access means your dreaded work problems invade you everywhere. In the past, you would have cancelled your holiday if a work crisis was that important, but nowadays people take it with them.

At the Hotel Caravanserai in Marrakesh earlier this year, I watched in wonder as a bloke zipped through a hi-tech Power Point presentation at the outdoor breakfast table with a baby on his knee. He was the same bloke (in fact the only bloke) who seemed to have found a mobile phone signal in this blackout spot close to the Atlas Mountains, and he spent hours marching around the pool muttering into his phone spoiling the mellow atmosphere for everybody (particularly his wife, whose sour face said it all as she was left holding their six-month-old twins).

A few weeks earlier at the Ickworth Hotel, a family retreat in Suffolk, I saw more of the same behaviour. As I pushed the buggy in the rain around the grounds by myself while husband downloaded emails in our room, the porter said with a knowing look: 'You have to work hard to play hard.'

But why not work and play less hard? Why bother spending hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds on a holiday not to gain much recuperation? Why not save your hard-earned money for a period when you can enjoy your holiday properly? Tony Blair has the rest of his life to go away.

One of the most relaxing breaks can be a 'balcony holiday'. This is what the Germans call taking time off work and staying at home. As most Germans live in flats, the only rays of sun they get are on their balconies.

We recently enjoyed a very successful balcony holiday during a stressful time. We went to Tate Modern, the Thames barrier and the Saatchi gallery - all things we never normally have time for - and had lots of time to talk and spend with the kids. And there was no extra stress from striking British Airways check-in staff, no cryptosporidium (the vicious waterborne parasite that induced sickness and diarrhoea in Mallorca last week), and no Club 18-30 reps having oral sex on the beach...