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I'm on holiday this week and it's raining. In fact, I feel sorry for the kids as it has rained most of their holidays. We have been in Holland staying at a holiday camp which is much cheaper than the UK equivalent and, as a bonus, has easy access to The Hague and it's one thousand shoe shops (it feels like 1,000). My partner has a bit of a shoe fetish and I have noticed that he is subtly trying to cultivate a similar fetish in his daughters.

Besides having a swimming pool, bars, a trampoline and a climbing frame, the other notable thing about the campsite is that it has those two tiered toilets so I spent much of the first few days being summoned to inspect various shapes of poo. The camp also had a kids' club with activities every morning. You had to pay in rabbit tokens. Unfortunately, when you have three children, that's quite a lot of rabbits so we avoided that, but toddler daughter (she no longer feels a little bit big and has taken to talking baby language and playing endless games with bonkers daughter where she is Lily and -bonkers daughter is Hannah. When Rebel daughter deigns to join in, she is Hannah and then there is an almighty battle over who is Oliver, Oliver being a boy and therefore second class) attended the kids' club mini disco every night.

Unfortunately, one of the leaders of the mini disco was a giant rabbit called Koos. Toddler daughter was fascinated, but appalled by the mere idea of a mutant dancing rabbit. She had to attend every night, but would not go anywhere near the rabbit and every night had to follow him to his "burrow" to make sure he had gone to bed. Meanwhile, Rebel and bonkers daughters insisted on going swimming every night during 'disco swimming' with all that entails - mainly teenagers with footballs. We got two days at the beach though had to run for cover on the second day. It's hard to say if it was relaxing. Bonkers and Rebel daughters launch themselves at the waves every time we go to the seaside and toddler daughter wants to stay as far from the sea as possible so we parents have to divide monitoring duties so, as at home, only see each other from a distance, albeit in swimsuits so slightly different from home.

I am known in my family for being a bit of a workaholic and I confess that I did smuggle some work-related reports into the camp, but actually failed to open more than one (and feel asleep within one page of this). However, I was getting email withdrawal by midweek. The camp had promised internet access in the restaurant, but sadly this turned out to be non-existent. I kept looking out for an internet cafe every time we passed a town, but no luck. I think it takes more than a week to totally switch off from work.

We watched a lot of Olympics in Dutch and were very pleased for all the Dutch teams, although couldn't quite figure out with our basic knowledge of Dutch (limited to alles goed - are you ok? - and kip/kaas - chicken/cheese) what on earth happened to the Dutch Antilles silver medallist who was disqualified. I felt very embarrassed about my lack of Dutch and tried to make up for it by speaking English in a Dutch accent and ending everything with Dank u wel, but I think this was probably more confusing than just speaking in English. My partner pointed out that every second advert is in English in Holland, they watch films in English and the tv was full of Secret Millionaire and, would you believe it, Gordon Ramsay programmes. Even in Holland it is impossible to escape cookery programmes. Luckily there were no Masterchef quarter finals. That's probably next week...