‘GOOD Heavens! Teabags on strings, eh. Don’t we live in an exciting and ever-improving world,” I said to my wife, while the kettle burped and bupped to the boil, under the Italian-wood fittings of the kitchen, found behind the conservatory on the south wing of our home.

But my words in praise of the dangling teabag were lost in the steam. Her turquoise orbs were journeying far away to the sweet meadows, the sheltering mountains and the sparkling seas of some glossy paradise.

“Oh where, oh where, shall we go?” she said finally, patting a hill of holiday brochures.

This is a difficult question for me to answer. As some of you already know, my knees quiver uncontrollably at the prospect of leaving the familiar sights of Birkenhead, even for 11 days in the summer.

For in the town of my birth, beneath the moon of perpetual wisdom, usually reliable sources have informed me that culture chiefs are now considering an inter-active, travelling museum/gallery, featuring brilliant young pavement artists, who work in the “medium” of chewing-gum, and a 24-hour pyjama-suit “experience” visiting a supermarket “near you” – as well as weekend “dodge the wheelie-bin competitions” and shopping-trolley races for all the family.

However, the cultural elite are advancing with understandable caution, having already encountered unexpected opposition from concerned coarse anglers (some very coarse) to their ambitious plans for a series of punitive ducking-stools to be stationed along the River Fender’s picturesque left bank – a popular picnicking spot before the sudden and unexplained retreat of the natterjack toads.

Anyway, back in reality, we were trying to decide on a destination for our summer holidays. My wife and our 12-year-old son had dismissed my annual suggestion of Cleethorpes with what I thought was indecent haste.

How things have changed, I thought, as a jaundiced liquid seeped grudgingly through the perforations on the teabag.

In the dandelion and burdock days of three-cornered egg and cress sandwiches and mothers smiling beside their vacuum flasks on tartan rugs, when toothless grannies yelped after trapping their fingers in the mechanical mysteries of the deckchair, there was always the hiss and fizz of the blushing sands, and that pebble between a lime green sock and a russet sandal’s sole, reminding you that this was your summer holiday.

I have always felt that summer holidays, like Christmas, are to be anticipated rather than enjoyed. As soon as you’re there, you become conscious of it slipping away, like the grains of sand in an hour-clock.

But then, years later, they reappear happily in the warmth of the memory. The moments of joy bound again into view. “Look there’s droopy drawers,” cooed my elder sister, when I emerged from the cubicle, pale as a ghost, and began stepping gingerly over the shingles to the sea in a pair of voluminous trunks, which my mean buttocks could never have hoped to fill.

How we all laughed, between shivers and showers, as we gathered, goospimpled, on that tartan rug for the post-bathing hamper. “Don’t you like fish paste and pickles?”

My first holiday abroad was in 1964 when tour companies flew large numbers of us to newly built, concrete resorts – dotted along the Spanish coast at the behest of Francisco Franco, the country’s brutal and humourless dictator, known as Caudillo to his timorous admirers.

He had correctly forecast that Spain’s flagging economy could be swiftly revived by introducing young Britons to the pleasures of cheap booze, chirping crickets, sunshine, omelettes, warm seas and bottom-pinching.

So it happened, that with my friend Brian, I spent a fortnight in Malgrat. It was £21 each (including return flights) and for that we had two excellent meals a day and a room with a balcony in a brand new hotel. Even now, I remember that holiday with affection. It pains me to admit this, but from then on the charms of our own coastal resorts, with those fierce landladies, kiss-me-quick hats and trusty pac-a-macs, began to wilt.

But one can, perhaps, be too ambitious with foreign travel. For example, a colleague has just returned from sunny China. Resisting the more obvious tourist gifts, such as roly-poly Buddhas to rest on the telly, an Olympic flag, a clockwork tractor or a beginner’s volume of Confucius’s sayings, she chose for her colleagues a packet of teabreak biscuits, which, apparently, are all the rage over there.

However, the biscuits were not just dry. They seemed to be composed of desert. If you had included them in the coastal defences at New Brighton, they would have drained the Mersey.

Now I wonder whether to drop one into the mug, where dangles the stringed teabag?

* LISTEN to David Charters on his podcast at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk