You know the sort.

Just before you go, you experience severe demeanour derailment, taking work in your stride, having uncharacteristically good moods, and listening – with genuine interest – to your colleague's summer holiday stories, where you wouldn't otherwise give a flying fudge.

And then you come home.

Work, within days, has you eyeing up the bleach, you can't even be bothered to manage eye contact with sickeningly excitable colleagues who won't shut up about their upcoming holiday plans, and you've lost the will to even verbally converse beyond inaudible grunts.

But why exactly is it that we suffer such PHS (post-holiday syndrome)? Is it because we're depressed to walk off a plane in the battering rain when we boarded only two hours earlier in the 30 degree sunshine?

Is it because we have to swap pina coladas for standing by the photocopier while it un-jams itself?

Or is it because we've just broke out of the overdraft and had the most stressful week of the past year?

Let me explain. You go on holiday, so you have the stress of scanning the net for flights that were last year £20, this year £435.

You then realise, courtesy of you chosen airline's draconian baggage policy, that, in order to fly with an extra pair of knickers, it's an extra £25 per person and, to take a guitar, it's £50. Brilliant.

Then you go to see the opera in Rome. The fat lady ain't singing. She's sitting on you. So you leave halfway through.

You hire a moped in Capri, bomb around the tiny roads that climb up a pant-wettingly high mountain, and you come off it at 40mph, scratch all your leg and burn it on the exhaust.

You then get on the wrong metro train in Rome, and end up heading to Firenze, landing in some Amish-type village where you're instructed to wait for the local bus that stops in front of the church, to take you to the nearest city with electricity and running water.

When you finally get back to Blighty (at 2.30am, up for work at 7am), you wake up half-dead, swallow some coffee and mouthwash, stagger into work with a make-up wipe stuck to your face, and have to listen while your colleague bangs on about her Spanish villa retreat next week.

Bleach, please.