Michael Gove should know that sums do not a summer make It's a bit brutal to deprive them of the Swallows and Amazons childhood I enjoyed, but I suppose it will save me a fortune in trampolining courses and photography workshops. Teachers, needless to say, are against it because their low starting pay is offset by the generous annual leave - and because who in their right mind would voluntarily give up two weeks of their holiday? Working parents are for it because it alleviates the annual childcare headache - except Lord only knows how much a family summer holiday will cost if peak season is concertina'd into four hellishly expensive weeks. But the most salient issue is whether shorter breaks will have the desired effect. The argument that state-educated children should have shorter holidays because many of them "lose ground" after kicking their heels for six weeks, is worth examining. My theory is that they don't slip backwards because they're not learning at school, but because they aren't learning at all. Not reading books, not playing outside, not experiencing anything that widens or challenges their minds, just FaceTiming and playing endless computer games. Long holidays have no adverse effect on children schooled in the private sector, partly because the quality of the education they receive is generally superior, mostly by dint of small class sizes, higher expectations and an awful lot more homework. But, more crucially, parents who pay for education - often at great sacrifice - prioritise it and instill that same ethos in their children. The state sector is hampered less by class size (although that is an issue) and more by the fact there's a significant stratum of society that simply doesn't care about education, and has no grasp of its value. Keeping kids in the classroom for longer won't necessarily change that - what might do the trick are summer activities designed to foster imagination and promote leadership. It's the character-building, extra-curricular stuff, after all, that gives a great many public schools the edge and is the main draw for their popularity with overseas students. There's no point cutting back on holidays for more of the same old, same old; mental maths and grammar drills. Give children and teenagers a glimpse of life's possibilities through tasks that challenge them, mentally and physically, penetrating the parts that the national curriculum can't reach. Let me emphasise that I'm not talking about the £7,000 foreign trip taken by "Safari Boy" Mark Hook, back in the 1990s, in order to help him mend his ways, which resulted in nothing more life-changing than 32 court appearances for 112 crimes. How about some sort of scheme akin to - OMG, I almost said "National Service" - I meant, of course, the outdoorsy trips that kids typically take in Year Six as a way of letting off steam after their SATs tests, but with a few forced marches thrown in. Maybe Gove is right and the only way to clamber up international league tables is to chain state pupils to their desks in the summer, miserably grafting away to the sound of lawnmowers, susurrating insects and the crack of leather upon willow. If so, then please Sir, have a heart - and instal a trampoline at the back of the class. My 10-year old daughter was born in the aftermath of the "MMR Scandal" and I can vividly remember the afternoon my NCT group sat, cradling our one-year-olds, and listening to a fellow mother and GP give us a mini-tutorial on the pros and cons of vaccination. It turned out the "evidence" suggesting a link between MMR and bowel disease/autism was flawed, misleading and discredited. Our doctor friend urged us to get our precious first-borns the vaccination. Yet still we hesitated and agonised and in some cases, demurred; the terrible spectre of autism seemed so much more potent than the prospect of a temperature and a few spots. But measles, as we have seen from the 800-strong outbreak in Swansea, is more than chicken pox with extra oomph. It can hospitalise, cause blindness and brain damage, and even kill. Back in 2003, several friends elected not to give their children the MMR. One went private and paid for a course of separate injections against measles, mumps and rubella that was deemed a safer approach. Her boy was later diagnosed with autism anyway. Another friend, a keen advocate of homeopathy, stoutly insisted that herd immunity would protect her first and subsequent sons. I'm not the only one to have recently urged her to rethink. Herd immunity is predicated on a 95 per cent take-up. Parental abstention has left that safety net in tatters. Following the herd isn't always about blind obedience; in the case of measles, herd instinct is about survival. Every woman has her breaking point. For me, it was Gwyneth Paltrow challenging Madonna to a six-pack, abs-at-dawn duel, in a bid to establish her washboard tummy supremacy, Gwynnie, 40, who was recently crowned the most hated star in Hollywood (I voted 3.5 million times), has clearly gone crazy courtesy of her macrobiotic ascetism. The madness is catching; Joan Collins (79) has announced she has been on a diet for 30 years, while Jennifer Aniston (44) is accessorising her little black dress with whopping great suction marks from detox "cupping." To the uninitiated, cupping is an expensive version of the furtive children's activity of sucking air out of the top of a felt tip pen, then (ta-da!) pulling it across your skin so it dangles, obscenely, from the cheek. Lovely. Finally, there's Anna Friel, whose bonkers anti-ageing regime is the beauty equivalent of waterboarding. She daily downs 12 glasses of a maple syrup, cayenne pepper and lemon juice cocktail and allegedly has blood from her arm pumped into her face. She's only 36, for pity's sake! And so to the burning question; is it worth it? Was Kate Moss right when she claimed nothing tastes as good as skinny feels? I have no idea, but the one think I can be certain of is that these starving, over-aerobicised vampire madwomen are doing it so we don't have to. Pass the cupcakes. Look away children, they're showing that ethnic-cleansing advert again! There's smashing, shooting and yes, improvised water cannons, all in the name of flogging sun loungers and barbecue buckets. I surely can't be alone in finding Ikea's "out with the old in with the new" commercial, in which garden gnomes are put to death, more than a little disturbing? It's hard to see why the introduction of a new Enholmen outdoor dining set really necessitates the mass execution of the existing residents, so re-homing them would seem to be the kindest course of action, but I'm not sure there would be too many takers. Garden ornaments still qualify as irredeemably naff rather than quaintly kitsch, which is why I am conspicuously unwilling to offer them asylum in my own garden. Before I'm accused of nimbyism, let me point out that we already have a life-size deer faun nestling in the plumbago, courtesy of my husband, who came over unexpectedly twee on a trip to a garden centre with the children. Actually, it's quite cute, but, it is also quite enough, thanks. I suggest the gnomes are neatly tidied away into the Ammerö storage bench. It might constitute illegal internment, but at least they can be retrieved when they come back into vogue.