THE holiday brochure should have read: "Welcome to the wonderful world of school holidays ... come in and be fleeced for all you are worth."

We had been trawling the internet and pouring over travel brochures in search of a spring break when the horrible truth revealed itself.

If you have children of school age you will never, ever get a holiday for less than a king's ransom.

Forget those last minute cheap deals, they are but a distant memory. The days of jetting off for two sun-soaked weeks in Costa Nothing are no more.

Instead all we can look forward to is a week in a caravan in Glasson Dock.

Fortunately we managed to secure a decent deal for our summer holiday perhaps because we booked it back in 1985 and are looking forward to 10 days in a gorgeous villa in the south of France.

I'm sure we'll all have a wonderful time ... as long as we can afford to get there, that is.

A couple of years ago we paid peanuts for our flights to Nice. Two adults and a toddler on a return flight from Liverpool barely made a dent in our pockets.

But of course, this was in mid-September all the children had gone back to school leaving the rest of us to holiday in style without having to take out a second mortgage.

This summer, however, it's an all too different scenario. Our son is at school and thus we need to take our holidays with the masses.

My husband believes that to take a child out of school for something as trivial as two weeks in the sun is a heinous crime even missing the last day of term is forbidden in our house so it looks like three flight tickets for the price of a house in Chelsea for us.

I sincerely hope every day of our holiday is hot and sunny because we won't have enough Euros left to entertain ourselves if there's even a spot of rain.

The same daylight robbery applied when we looked at the cost of a three day break in spring.

This time no foreign travel would be involved, just a few days in the good old British Isles. It's something we've always done a little holiday, a getaway, call it what you will, we tend to think of it as a little treat to break up the monotony of work.

But once again we are being penalised for having a child of school age as we have discovered prices have, in some cases, doubled in the school holidays.

We will, of course, still book something. Everyone needs a holiday after all. But it makes my blood boil when a holiday that cost us £400 rockets to just under a grand a week later.