So here I am again, driving down the Route de Soleil, trying to map-read in the boiling heat while behind me, screams and yells of head-splitting volume and frequency are gaining in intensity. "I'm bored!" "He hit me!" "You hit me first, snotface!" mingle with the unctuous tones of Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter. We've had this bloody tape on a loop for the past six hours, and I long to stop it just to get the volume down but, even seemingly in full cry, my children shriek still louder the moment it's switched off. The back seat is a tip of discarded crisp packets, empty water bottles, sweet-wrappers and sun-block smears.
Hurrah for the hols! Or, rather, not. I don't know one parent who actually looks forward to this seven-week period of summer purgatory, especially those of us trying to work for at least part of the day. Utter, stomach-clenching dread is the usual reaction, especially if one or more of your children flatly refuse to do any holiday courses. But if it's bad enough at home, where you have a number of resources from the blessed local library to the DVD player, going away on holiday is off the Richter scale in stress. Every year I can feel a sort of scream of desperation and frustration building up inside me like steam in a kettle. By the time we are en route to whatever cottage we have rented for a fortnight, I am waking up at night shouting "No!" Because holidays are hell, utter hell, and every year I can barely stagger through them.
Of course, I adore my children, and vice versa; and, of course, I love playing with them. So does their father. They have powerful imaginative lives, adventurous spirits and brave hearts. It ought, therefore, to be possible to avoid what Larkin called "the forgotten boredom of childhood". Dream on. These qualities can keep a 10-year-old occupied for two hours, but won't last 40 minutes with a younger one. The demands for company, attention, treats and organised games are relentless. Like dogs, they need serious exercise every day for at least an hour, which in the summer heat means either the sea or a pool. This, in turn, means that you get woken at dawn by demands for a swim. Forget those languorous lie-ins you had before kids arrived, this is more like boot camp for parents.
A holiday deprives you of almost all the resources of home, so that even if you pack a bag full of books and story-tapes, even if you empty the local supermarket of felt-tips and craft materials, you will still be faced with the nightmare of full-on parenting. My children have all the force of my personality plus the energy of someone 30 years younger.
I can buy organic food, give them only water to drink, attempt only the most soothing activities and stories, and it makes no difference. Without the draining effect of school, they'll still be firing on all pistons until the small hours. My friends pack Calpol just to ensure their children go to sleep; others swear by anti-histamine tablets and syrup. I've tried both, without success. They love being on holiday so much they don't want to miss a single hour of it, which is lovely for them but shattering for us. Every evening it takes an escalating series of bribes and threats to get them into bed so that my husband and I can have about two hours of real holiday - that is, talking quietly to each other over a glass of wine before we collapse.
If I could have a holiday before my holiday, it might be different. But we take ours at the hottest time of the year, in a strange place, and at a peak of stress and exhaustion. Where my kids have been able to chill at home, or tire themselves out playing, their parents are taking this break after a frenzy of clearing the decks at work and home. In my case, the boundaries between work and home are a little blurred: in my new novel, Love in Idleness, which is an update of A Midsummer Night's Dream, three children concoct a love potion to slip the adults in their lives while on holiday. Alas, my two are so entranced by this idea that they are now mixing potions of their own. Any rented holiday home is now likely to be stained, scarred or blown up. I wonder whether I should pack straitjackets along with the blackout material for the windows, wasp-sting removers, earplugs and rose-tinted spectacles. I'm definitely packing Valium.
How did our parents manage it? Perhaps they didn't. I have vague memories of the whole family singing sea-shanties to pass the journey-time; of threats to leave us by the side of the autobahn if we didn't stop quarrelling; of being sick. Yet every summer, we would drive 1,000 miles from London to Italy - without any of the incidents that seem to haunt us now. There was the time we crashed the rented holiday car because we were all laughing so hard at a tape of Francesca Simon's Horrid Henry that we didn't notice the road had a bend in it ... There was the time we discovered that the pool for which we'd paid a fortune was infested by wasps, which stung our terrified children repeatedly ... There was the house whose walls are now indelibly covered in my daughter's name because she had just learned to write. And last year, we rented a house in France that was so hot that we turned around and drove back 600 miles rather than spend another 24 hours there.
With children, you find yourself buying battery-operated fans just to keep them quiet for 20 minutes; you inflict yourself on the poshest hotel you can afford because it might have cable TV; you drive 100 miles to see another family with kids in order to have a break from your own. You have no choice but to spend, spend, spend. We need a holiday to get over our holiday more than ever. But how can you have one when the two people you love best in the world are chained to you like lunatics?
Some people, in order to solve the problem of containing seemingly irrepressible childish energy, go on holiday with their friends and relations. This is what the family does in my novel, and researching it underlined the wisdom of never inflicting your holiday persona and, indeed, your children on other people. Even if your kids and theirs don't end up fighting all the time, it's a short cut to falling out as adults. Just to be on the safe side - and because there are, occasionally, patches in which we really are having a wonderful time - we're sticking with them.
· Amanda Craig's new novel, Love in Idleness, is published by Little,Brown on July 28 priced £12.99. To order a copy p&p-free, call the Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979.
