Evidence that seaside holidays can feature all kinds of exciting fun and adventure

Here are some experiences from our holiday in Tenby, South Wales, last week.

Newer, more naive followers now expecting pictures of the Great Outdoors, such as sandy beaches, seascapes and bird life, look away now, or go here ... pictures of oceans on the National Geographic website

So, Saucepan-gate.

This is the second time this year we've rented the same Tenby holiday cottage. We went there at Easter, too, when we took our grown-up ex-Masterchef-contestant-and-cook-extraordinaire daughter with us. She was our chef for the week and the reason why, when we got home, we only battled through our front door by wearing elastic pants and breathing in.

She'd brought on holiday with her at Easter a selection of knives and other equipment from her own kitchen. But at the end of the week when she arrived back at her house in London, she realised she'd left a favourite pan behind at the cottage.

We knew we'd be going back at some point - it's the best cottage ever, overlooking the beach but only one minute's walk from the biscuit aisle at Tesco, so we've been there six or seven times now.

I texted my daughter last Saturday to say, 'We're here', and she replied with Hope you're having a lovely time Was your journey good? What's the weather like? Is my pan still in the cupboard?

I took the above picture and texted it to her. 'Yes! That's my PAN!' came the reply, as though we'd been on an episode of Who Do You Think You Are and I'd shown her a photograph of a relative in New Zealand she lost touch with in the 1980s.

We don't have a car and so travel by train. Taking this large, heavy pan back with us - one of those you can lift BEFORE you've cooked rice in it but not afterwards - wasn't an option. And we refused to send it back via the Post Office even though she texted, 'But I want it NOW.' We could see that little venture becoming a saga involving boxes, packing material, sticky tape, string, broken nails, twenty pounds for postage and a day of our holiday gone. That wasn't the kind of holiday we'd had in mind. I for one had been looking forward to the long hikes around the Welsh coast reading in cafes.

I'm sure there ARE activity holidays one can go on of this ilk called 'Packing for Pleasure' or 'Partying with Parcels', held in country houses in Shropshire, with string seminars and polystyrene packing material workshops, and evenings around a log fire discussing different types of knots. And I'm sure people who sign up for those holidays are very nice and not in need of urgent psychiatric treatment at all.

In the end, when some other members of our clan came to visit us for the day, we asked them to take the pan, and put it in the back of their car, so that just before Christmas, when we see them, it can have its second vacation of the year in our kitchen until we see our daughter. I am tempted to pack it up and put it under our tree as her Christmas present. In fact, so I can do it in style, I might book myself on a seasonal package holiday of the type described above, perhaps called 'Christmas and Cardboard For Fun'.

I had all sorts of other typical seaside adventures to tell you about, but the saucepan saga has taken a whole blog post. These saucepans are needy types, wanting all the attention, and deliberately hiding in cupboards so as to cause a lot of fuss and bother just when people are busy in cafes trying to eat a whole piece of lemon drizzle cake the size of a semi-detached house.

Reasons for elastic pants #2