I LOVE this time of year. The light nights are here, we have the whole summer to look forward to, and it’s time to book a holiday.

And now we have booked ours, it’s only a matter of time before somebody asks us: “Are you going anywhere nice?” - a question to which I am always tempted to reply that we wouldn’t have booked it if we didn’t think it was nice.

After a bad and costly experience of booking through a major travel agent last year, after which I vowed never to use one again, we have discovered that booking it yourself is part of the pleasure.

It’s now a doddle to do it on the internet, including reserving a window seat on the plane, which is the most important part of any foreign holiday for somebody like me who enjoys flying so much that I even love airports and airline food.

Thanks to a combination of TripAdvisor, Google Maps and other internet tools, these days you can plan and preview your holiday from the comfort of your own living room, so the anticipation is almost as good as the holiday itself.

The only problem, as far as I can see, is choosing where to go, exactly, in a world that has become our proverbial oyster.

Even if we have to save up and make it a holiday of a lifetime, most of us can now afford to go, at least once, to somewhere we’ve always dreamed about.

In poorer times, when options were more limited, it was not unusual for some families to choose to return to the same haunts, year after year.

But nowadays you would have to like it very much indeed if you chose to go back to somewhere you had been before.

So I was surprised recently to bump into a man who likes his holiday destination so much, he and his wife have been going there every year since 1958.

Every September they leave their home in Stratton to spend a week or two in St Ives.

I can see the attraction, because I recently spent a winter break there myself and, with the exception of Great Yarmouth, which holds special sentimental appeal, I would say that St Ives is my favourite seaside destination in the whole of Britain.

It’s lovely, but I wouldn’t go there every year. And certainly not again this year.

Probably because of my age, our choice for this summer has been completely different from previous ones.

Not usually ones for sitting still very long, we usually book busy holidays in places that have lots of interest, but this year our destination is governed as much by the slow pace of life as anything else.

So we are off to Corfu, with the intention, for once, of simply taking it easy and putting our feet up for at least part of the time.

And we can even spend some of our time away thinking ahead to next year’s holiday, after my wife dropped a bombshell this week.

While watching a T20 World Cup cricket match on the telly, she suddenly revealed that she would like one day to take a holiday that involved watching a whole Test match.

As they don’t play Test matches in St Ives, I had visions of holidaying in Birmingham, Nottingham or Leeds, but then it dawned on me that she was actually thinking we should go abroad to the West Indies, Australia, South Africa or even India.

So while we are soaking up the sun in Corfu in July, we will have plenty of time to establish two things.

Where shall we go?

And why on earth didn’t she tell me before?