Have these holidaying celebrities never heard of sun loungers?

The Beckhams have been on holiday in Miami this week. Quite right, too. Nice for them to have a bit of a treat. But it looked like an alarmingly active holiday to me. There were trips to a water park and an amusement arcade, salsa lessons from Jennifer Lopez’s husband, shopping, deep-sea fishing and a constant stream of social media from almost every member of the family. They don’t appear to have visited a museum or local site of architectural interest, but perhaps they just didn’t photograph those bits.

Elsewhere, Penny Lancaster practised her golf swing on a superyacht floating about the French Riviera and, in Antigua, footballer Lionel Messi had a kickabout with a British boy also holidaying there.

I feel, therefore, that it falls to me to

explain to these celebrities, and anyone else who needs similar assistance, that throwing oneself down water chutes and doing the paso doble is too much activity for a summer holiday. For why else did God invent sun loungers, if not for us to flop shortly after breakfast, only to peel ourselves up for lunch and later again for “drinks time” which, depending on your family, may start at around 6pm. Although I understand that others pop that first cork much earlier, perhaps around elevenses, and that is fine too, especially if you are on holiday with small children.

I’ve just returned from a few days in Spain, where the most energetic we got was during a discussion about how many Magnums a day was too many. The ice creams, I mean, although we could have had a similar discussion about the wine, because we knocked through that as well. Excepting the drive from the airport and back, I didn’t get in a car once, and while there was a chap who asked “Anyone for tennis?” over breakfast one morning, we dealt with him swiftly and he was very contrite when we let him out of his room the following day.

“Should we go to the beach for

Too hot: why have a kickabout when you can just kick back?

lunch?” someone ventured at another point while we lay like sleeping lions around the pool. There were instant murmurs of dissent at the idea of forcing the children into hot car seats, a drive in convoy, a fight to find, first, a parking space anywhere on the Costa Brava and, secondly, a table where a desultory waiter would fling a basket of calamares at us before one of the children had a meltdown and we had to return to the now-really-quitescalding car seats and motor back again. My Fitbit kept shrieking on my wrist, urging me to increase my steps but, devil that I am, I ignored it. Any sudden movement, apart from eating and drinking, was simply too arduous.

I stress that I’m talking about summer holidays here. Feel free to do whatever you like on holidays taken at other times of the year. I hate skiing myself, largely because I’m rubbish at it, but it’s a perfectly adequate winter holiday activity. If you find yourself on the Amalfi coast in February, then you’re quite at liberty to visit Pompeii. But during these hot months, you must try to remain as still and horizontal as possible. If these temperatures keep rising, playing golf or football could become increasingly dangerous, anyway.