THERE is more than a strong sense of anti-climax when one returns from holiday.

By the time the hotel unceremoniously dumps you from your room at the obligatory noon mark, getting back home is something to look forward to.

The acceptance has already set in that the dream is over. No more afternoons will be spent lazing around on sun loungers, followed by evenings enjoying a (very cheap) meal al-fresco.

And the fact that in 12 hours or so you will be sitting in your own front room drinking good old-fashioned English tea is a notion to cling to - something to keep you going while you are packed in between the sweating fat ladies on the plane home.

It's only when that moment actually arrives, you realise how fanciful it was in the first place.

You spend 50 weeks of the year planning your escape from these shores only to romanticise about it when you are gone. I've spent this past week in Crete listening to a chorus of voices singing the praises of their home nation.

A gaggle of different accents saying how things abroad are different... the weather is too hot, the shop is too far etc. How - towards the dying days of their break - they were looking forward to getting back to good old Blighty, where the language is common, the culture is familiar and you know where you are with the food.

I listened to one Scouse family moan about how different McDonald's tasted in Greece! It was soon apparent that I was not sharing a hotel with a bunch of Alan Whickers.

The Long Suffering Marjorie and myself were only too eager to embrace the differences in our surroundings.

Not to the extent of smashing the plates after every meal (breakages will be paid for, screamed the "welcoming letter" from the holiday company, which had obviously encountered such actions) but we are not among the 90-odd per cent of people who take their own tea bags with them.

And living without HP sauce - for all its tanginess and meat-enhancing exponents - will not kill us either.

That said, we too were caught up in the excitement generated by our fellow passengers when it came to setting off home.

Tales of what we had missed while away were being bandied about like war stories by battle-weary soldiers getting ready for home leave after a particular arduous mission.

But the look on those very same soldiers was something more closely related to shellshock than unabashed patriotism when our plane touched down on a typically grey day in Manchester.

For the LSM and I, drained from a four-hour flight, which set off at 2am, any faint pride in our home country was washed away when we walked straight into a rail strike at Manchester's Piccadilly station.

"Where have you been Our Kid?" asked the porter with absolutely no sense of recognition he was talking to someone who had blatantly been out of the country for a few days and would not know of any disputes.

Even the fact I was holding a suitcase, wearing shorts and had colour in my face was lost on him. "There's a bus waiting outside instead."

I don't mean to sound like I am England-bashing but I've already got the brochures for next year's break.

And I really cannot wait.