THERE was a time when packing for a weekend away meant putting a spare pair of knickers in my handbag. I prided myself on travelling light, flitting about like an over-excited moth with less sense of direction than Mark Thatcher after a couple of shandies.

Planning was never my forte. So, while others meticulously scheduled their trips from door to door, my friend Jo and I (yes, that did confuse people, particularly those who bizarrely asked "oh, are you sisters?") would literally let the road map dictate our movements by letting it fall open and heading off to wherever looked most interesting on the page.

This was a ridiculously random way of organising our lives, but it worked. We had some wild weekends at places we would never normally have visited, including Great Yarmouth where my chum met a chap in a nightclub who she ended up marrying. Not the same weekend; we weren't that wild.

Now, however, things have changed. A weekend away is no longer a carefree jaunt, it is a minutely plotted, military-style manoeuvre that would put the SAS to shame.

Last weekend, for example, we took the kids to the Lake District. A simple enough task, you might think. But that is before you factor in packing the car, a less than simple task that took us the best part of three hours.

While the kids entertained themselves by drawing on each other's faces and torturing the cats ("please don't try to poke that in there sweetheart, they really don't like it"), we tried to squeeze all our worldly possessions into a space approximately the size of a dog kennel - for a Yorkshire terrier, not a Great Dane.

We were like a particularly dim pair of Krypton Factor contestants who had been given a pile of oddly-shaped pieces and told to slot them together to create a dodecahedron or some other such unpronounceable shape. We knew our stuff would fit in the boot somehow, we just didn't know which bit to put where.

After much head-scratching, foul language and buggy-kicking, it was decided that something had to give. Surely, my beloved other half inquired, we didn't really need two bags of clothes, a travel highchair, a box of toys, a box of books, a buggy, a crate of booze, a cooler box and a recycling box recycled as a food carrier.

Of course not my darling, I replied politely, without so much as a hint of bitterness. It is all disposable, frivolous nonsense - unless you want to wear clean clothes, eat food, drink beer and keep the kids occupied for more than a millisecond.

Maybe it was the thought of having to live in a log cabin with bored children, or maybe it was the thought of having to live in a log cabin with bored children without any beer that made us attack the problem with renewed vigour.

Whatever the reason, we eventually managed to shove, cram and nudge our stuff into every available space before quickly slamming the boot before it all pinged out again.

And we were off. We couldn't see so much as a chink of light through the rear window and heavily-laden boxes were teetering a little too close to the kids' heads for comfort, but we had achieved our goal. Success!

Well, sort of. We lost the camera, my swimming costume disappeared and we left the little one's changing mat in her bedroom at home.

Heaven help us when we go away for a week.

A controversial new report claims that excessive drinking can make women's brains shrink. Well, all I can say to that is...no, it's gone.

Updated: 09:24 Monday, May 23, 2005