I DON’T know about you, but I find August incredibly challenging. We think of it as the holiday month, and yet it’s anything but relaxing - precisely because of the holidays.

Any home-worker will understand the difficulty of trying to do a job in a location suddenly overrun with young folk demanding snacks/treats/trips, and/or playing super-loud music/DVDs. Daughter has developed a taste for The Maze Runner series; I’ve yet to work out the plot, other than a bunch of smoking hot young blokes doing an awful lot of shouting. I have grown very used to having the house to myself, and like things nice and quiet, so the abrupt change in atmosphere takes some getting used to – about six weeks, I’d say.

Like everyone, we are making use of the infeasibly long school vacation to squeeze in a couple of breaks, performing a delicate dance around colleagues trying to achieve the same. We’ve had two staycations, although unlike Truro councillor James Tucker, whose column recounts his adventures in Cornwall and Scilly, we have ventured further afield – over the border in Devon, and all the way up the M6 to Scotland.

I’m prepping for the latter right now, and my stress levels are through the roof. My to-do list has taken on a length of unrealistic proportions, and never seems to go down as I add more tasks to the bottom as quickly as I tick them off from the top. My brain is in overdrive, my pace quick enough to rival an Olympic sprinter.

It would seem I’m not alone. In 2016, travel and tourism lecturer PhD lecturer Liz Sharples found that people regret booking holidays to the point of feeling unwell. Women, especially those who work – which is most of us, these days - are especially prone, with 44 per cent reporting a spike in stress levels, because despite the leaps and bounds made in emancipation, we are still more likely to shoulder the burden of organising, booking, cancelling, packing ….

A blog from Harvard, no less, found that 62 per cent of people experienced elevated stress levels at Christmas, caused by financial demands, family dynamics, lack of exercise combined with excess food – all of which could apply to any holiday, not just the jolly season.

A case in point: I’m writing this column at the hairdresser’s, while Daughter has a buzz cut (I talked her out of the mohawk). When I had short hair as a child, I was mortified whenever strangers mistook me for a boy – on one Scottish holiday, a shopkeeper referred to me as “laddie”. I grew my hair long after that, but I still bear the emotional scars (I’m not sure I want to go back to Scotland even now).

In the 21st century, however, Daughter wears such misgendering as a badge of honour. The pre-holiday haircut was essential, and I’m having my own bird’s nest sorted our later. Leave it another week, and we’d both be pulling hair out, starting with our own before turning onto what’s left of each other’s.

Other items on my checklist include making sure we’re stocked up on essentials, such as cat and rabbit food for our lovely pet feeder to dish out in our absence; collecting an HRT prescription so I don’t kill anyone over the next week; putting the bins out, including the food caddy which is already attracting a colony of fruit flies; cancelling the milk and the fruit box delivery; taking Father-in-Law for his weekly shop (usually a Saturday morning routine); washing and hanging underwear to ensure we have enough clean smalls, because they probably don’t sell knickers in Scotland (they all wear kilts, right?).

The stress involved in going on holiday was described by Harvard as “an acute reaction to an immediate threat”, requires what psychology academics refer to as “shifting set” -adopting cognitive strategies to respond to changes in our environment.

Is that akin to how our ancestors would have felt upon witnessing the swift approach of a very dangerous animal? We have been watching the BBC documentary series Human, presented by evolutionary biologist Ella Al-Shamahi, and it has been fascinating to learn more about how homo sapiens, never the biggest or strongest of primates, was able to outlive its competitors simply on account of its problem-solving abilities and its capacity for innovation.

Through that prism, it would seem that our ancestors did all the heavy lifting, and now all we have to worry about is our holiday. Two days before we were due to leave, the Met Office announced the scheduled visit of Storm Erin, downgraded from Hurricane but feisty nonetheless, and heading for the same places as us, at exactly the same time. This was a bit of a blow, but there is a solution: perhaps we should take the low road to Loch Lomond after all.