Leave your baggage at home before heading off on your holidays this summer

There's a mad optimism abroad in the land. In various clothing retailers, ladies of varying sizes are holding up bikinis of varying sizes and announcing that they'll probably fit. They certainly won't.

Buying clothes to go on holiday has always seemed odd to me, unless you are heading for the south of France, where the only things cheap are the wine and the air, or Easter Island, which is possibly the only place left on the globe with no access to Primark. Apart from Edinburgh, that is.

Strict minimum has always been my motto. If it can't be fitted in a small case and washed in a sink, no deal. A few years ago we holidayed in the United States of America. We flew to LA and hired an RV. When we arrived to collect said vehicle, we had to wait behind a Swiss family, consisting of papa, mamma and two teenage girls. I thought they were emigrating. They had a mountain of luggage with them, a positive Eiger of holdalls so vast that two rival teams of British mountaineers were lurking at the base to assault the South Face, sustained only by Kendal Mint Cake.

We turned up with a bag. That's right, just one bag, between four of us.

I figured that since we were going to the land of the giant shopping mall, why would you take a bundle of stuff you've already bought? I mean, they have pants in America. They are, of course, a different thing, so my then-seven-year-old son did look a little odd with easy-iron chinos under his shorts, but when I explained that's how Superman did it, he was much happier.

On a rainy day recently, two lovely ladies of Leith were laden with arm loads of brightly covered scanties, when the blonde spotted just one more pair of shorts, which, she proclaimed were just the thing to cover the stubble.

Since I suspect she wasn't really blonde, you could see her dilemma. Well, you would in those shorts.