I’m back from my holidays and the first thing everyone wants to know is whether I have been anywhere nice. Now you can be sure that in most cases anywhere nice doesn’t include Ballybunion, Clonakilty or Fanore, or Ardmore for that matter. But having a few day trips and a couple of nights away around the country was exactly what I needed for a good, relaxing holiday.

As I get older, I’m becoming more like my mother. Apart from her honeymoon, she never took a holiday or left the country. When I married and made my home in Limerick, she used to arrive down from Wicklow for two weeks and call it her holidays.

She loved Kerry and a jaunt around Muckross House in a tub trap was her idea of heaven. She’d be over the moon if the jarvey let her take the reins. Most of the two weeks was spent whitewashing, cleaning up outhouses, making jam and gardening. We were glad of the rest when she headed for home.

Like her, I haven’t the slightest urge to leave the country. I put it down to the fact that this year our three children covered a big part of the globe between them. So with Skype calls, following them on Facebook and keeping in contact through WhatsApp, it actually felt as if I had been halfway round the world anyway.

So sitting in the sunshine in the square in Clonakilty, with a coffee and a fancy cake, was just as good as having the same fare in the south of France. Long walks on the beaches in Ballybunion, Inch and Ardmore were pure heaven. And as for the Wild Atlantic Way, what an enticing way to explore some of the best scenery in the world.

I loved our visit to the toy soldier factory in Kilnamartyra. Its Battle of Waterloo display has to be seen to be believed. More than 13,000 figures, cast and painted in perfect military detail, are laid out in a recreation of this famous event.

The food we had, whether it was in a small café or any of the more well-known restaurants, was first class. I’d never been to the Cliff House in Ardmore and the meal we had there was simply stunning. Staying in Waterford, we had lunch at The Tannery in Dungarvan, where Paul Flynn put up some great fare. In Fenit, the West End proved a great find, with lovely food, beautifully cooked. And in Castletownsend, we dined under the ripening bunches of grapes in Mary Ann’s Bar and Restaurant. It may as well have been the south of France.

Most of the time was spent at home and I enjoyed watching the swifts ducking and diving around the house in preparation for their long journey back to South Africa.

One of our own little nestlings returned home from his J1 this week after four months working in the US. Shannon Airport was full of mammies and daddies waiting to welcome their young people home. All I could think of were those homes where the bedroom remains empty and the young adult is never coming back. They’d all set out with such high hopes of a summer in America. Sadly for some, it wasn’t to be. May they rest in peace.