But there are others in our family who insist that "we must go away somewhere".

Yet there are only so many times you can holiday in Butlins or Blackpool before the novelty starts to wane.

Of course, these days Blackpool is out of the question except for day trips to the Pleasure Beach where the children can stuff themselves with sweets and candy floss before going on the Pepsi Max.

There are still people around who think Blackpool is the ideal summer holiday destination. Some of them are not even members of Blackpool Hebrew Congregation.

So what entertainment can we expect this year in Blackpool? Well, at the Opera House, Winter Gardens, you can see Roy "Chubby" Brown. Your booba will love him!

At the same venue there's also a show called The Best of British Variety featuring among others, Cannon and Ball, The Krankies and Jimmy Cricket.

If that doesn't make you jump off Central pier screaming I don't know what will.

Israel and America are both very expensive at this time of year so the temptation is to visit the Continent.

Frankly, I advise against it. Early British visitors to Europe used to embark on a lengthy grand tour, taking in all the cultural sights, sounds and tastes on offer.

They were rarely impressed. The Continent, they wrote to relatives back home, was full of funny foreigners who didn't speak a word of English and had never heard of Magna Carta or fish and chips.

Worst of all, instead of working nine to five like any decent Englishman, the locals would shut up shop at midday on the spurious ground that it was "too hot", eat a huge lunch washed down with several bottles of wine before retiring to bed in the afternoon to make love to their wives (or, in the case of the French, to other men's wives).

Little has changed since then. Europe's tourist resorts are full of, well, tourists actually so you have to queue for ages in the hot sun to see anything.

Back in your hotel you can't access the Internet terminals because they are being monopolised by Chinese children playing endless computer games instead of moving aside to allow their "elders and betters" to pick up their business email.

As you may have guessed, I am just back from holidaying in Europe.

Notwithstanding all the aforementioned perils associated with the Continent, I had to go.

Word reached me earlier in the year that there is a kosher restaurant on the European mainland where the staff are even ruder and more unhelpful than they are in Golders Green or Tel Aviv.

How could that be? As a connoisseur of Jewish bad manners in the service industry, I felt duty-bound to investigate, so earlier this month we embarked en famille for Liverpool airport to catch a cheap and cheerful Ryanair flight to Rome.

La Taverna Del Ghetto is a supervised fleishig restaurant situated, as its name suggests, in what was once Rome's Jewish quarter along the Via del Portico d'Ottavia.

The place was quiet when we ventured in from the heat last Tuesday lunchtime. Do you have a children's menu?

"No. Children must order from the main menu," came the reply. A promising start!

Is there a house wine?

"No. Here is the wine menu but you have to order a whole bottle, not a half bottle or by the glass. The cheapest is 40 Euros" (over £30). Bonus points!

Questions about various courses on the admittedly wideranging menu were met with grunts, shrugs and unhelpful answers.

In the end, we paid for our drinks and walked out without ordering. A couple of doors along the street is Nona Betta, a supervised milchig restaurant where we had a very nice meal indeed.

Rome may be the centre of the Catholic church, but by rights it ought to be a Jewish city. Jews first arrived here two centuries before Paul of the New Testament (aka Saul, a Jew.)

Did you know that the Colliseum was built with money seized by Titus during his war against the Jews?

No one knows what happened to all the treasures stolen by the Romans from the Second Temple (as depicted on Titus' Arch in the Forum area) but rumour has it that some of them, together with other Jewish artefacts stolen in subsequent centuries, are hidden in the Vatican's vaults.

To date, the Pope's representatives have declined all requests to provide an inventory.

So the Italians owe us big-time. Without the Jews there would have been no Colisseum, no Church of Rome and no Pope.

"What have the Romans ever done for us?" asks the John Cleese character in Monty Python's Life of Brian. I can answer in two words: Ice cream.

The range of ice cream flavours available in every parlour is mind-boggling; how about pine kernel?; or custard with wine? What do you think the Italians would make of Snowcrest parev vanilla? Would they recognise it as ice cream?

That's the trouble with holidays abroad. Long lunches, bottles of wine, romance in the afternoon, warm sultry evenings, ice cream in a thousand different flavours, you soon realise that foreigners are having way too much fun.

For peace of mind, it's probably best to stick to Blackpool where you are guaranteed a good time without having to take your clothes off (unless you fancy a swim in the Irish Sea).

Let Wee Jimmy Krankie have the last word: "Fan-dabi-dozi".

E-MAIL: sdorfman@jewishtelegraph.com