Having spent almost two weeks harping on about the perils of sharing a holiday with friends and other families, it’s only now that we’re actually here — in a seaside village in north Norfolk — that I’ve remembered the most pestilential problem of all: the couple who row.

Before we get to that, though, let’s take a moment to address the other unsettling phenomenon of this week: the sun has shone. We’re in Britain, by the seaside, trying to holiday-make and it’s actually been like a summer. Parents look almost relaxed. Children enjoy glorious days on the beach as if it’s a proper holiday. Perhaps the only victims in the whole of Norfolk of this unscheduled sunshine have been Mr W and I.

Because we don’t have kids we ended up getting the worst bedroom in the house; a child’s room on the very top level, where the windows were covered with two flimsy, almost sheer, Thomas the Tank Engine curtains. As a result we’ve been woken every morning at 4.45 by a merciless sun beating down from a cloudless sky. Mr W has become completely grumpy.

All of which is by way of explanation that we are in fact “the couple who row”.

Our row involved directions. Mr W had asked me (the passenger) to direct him (the driver) to a certain local town, which I did, faultlessly. Except it turned out that Mr W had misspoken the name of the destination in his original barked orders and we were now in a very similar- sounding but substantially different town, 50 miles in the wrong direction. Mr W swore that he’d given the name of the town to me quite clearly, while I will go to my grave maintaining that he mispronounced it. When we got back to the cottage, Mr W slammed the car door and then the front door, which alerted the whole house to the fact that we were having a row. There’s nothing like a couple having a huge row to bring a household together.

After the initial cat fight, the next stage is for the whole household to break into two camps — invariably created along gender lines. The men will go to the pub and get the issue out of the way. While the women will stay at home and offer sympathy to the wronged woman and probe for more serious faultlines in the relationship.

As soon as the boys had gone to the pub, we women gathered on the garden terrace, where I recounted the full story, plus a bit I haven’t mentioned: that I’d left my reading glasses at home, but had been too scared to tell Mr W who would have been angry with me, so I had only been pretending to read the map and was just giving impressionistic directions.

Frankly, I was lucky we even ended up in a town that sounded vaguely like our objective. Obviously, if Mr W ever finds out I really will be in my grave, but the girls found it funny.

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