There’s nothing like a holiday to remind us of the addictive joy of routine

It was a disturbing email – shook me to the core, it did. “Would you both come to dinner on August 12?” Innocuous, you might think. But dig deeper. Check that date on the calendar. See the horror? Yes. It was a Monday. A dinner party on a Monday.

Now I know they’re a little whacky up there on Exmoor – indeed, they say for every five miles you travel further onto the moor you go back 10 years. There are people there who live without electricity, there are pubs with nothing but a single ale on tap. But a dinner party on a weeknight, and at the very dawn of the week? Yes, it’s August, school’s off, vacations are on, but surely we shouldn’t mess with the very core of our schedule.

In a slight tweak to the song by Craig David: Mondays and Tuesdays are for staying home and watching telly, Wednesdays are for non-alcoholic excursions (cinema, pottery club, build-your-own-deckchair Zoom class), you can have some cheeky drinks on a Thursday, dinner parties are for Fridays, Saturdays you stay home and glug wine round the kitchen table but don’t go to bed too late, Sundays are for big family lunches and Sunday night is an absolute booze-free zone and the Antiques Roadshow. How difficult is that?

Then along comes the Monday night dinner party invite and we’re scrabbling around looking for excuses, just as James Bond seeks arms when the enemy surrounds his house. I’m English, don’t mess with my routine. Routine is what grounds me, centres me, settles me; is around which I can then build purpose.

It’s one of the reasons one feels anxious as a holiday approaches. A strange country, hotel or villa, town or village, sea or pool awaits. You can do all the research you like but until you’re actually there, you can’t stamp your routine all over it.

Although we pretend – we kid ourselves that what a holiday offers is a break from routine. But once we discover where breakfast is, what time the pool opens, what the quickest route to the sea is and what the tavernas, cafes and markets offer, we do that utterly insane, but irresistible thing; which is to build a routine and become a local. Even if we’re only there for two days.

In France last week, having experienced the hotel’s dismal breakfast and realised we had a small kitchen in our room, each morning (after my pre-brekkie hotel pool swim – which the wretches refused to allow access to before 8.30am), I nipped to the patisserie for two croissants, two pains au chocolat and a baguette. At 10am, we headed to the beach.

The first morning, we rented a parasol patch; the one by the boardwalk three rows up from the end. We then bagged the same spot every day for the ensuing week. We nipped off for lunch at noon, then back to the hotel for kips, then back to the beach before 6PM showers and evening drinks, then dinner (rotating four good places we had identified). The routine was thus stamped all over the holiday (with the odd excursion negotiated and planned). All was calm.

What a bunch of nutters we are. And I’m sure you’re the same. You find the café, the bar and the drink, and you just can’t help yourself fetching up for the same thing at the appointed hour. You’re a local, and when you’ve been there for just four days you spy new holiday-makers arriving and chuckle at these newbies padding about trying to find their feet, desperate to forge their routines. And when you leave, they’ll take up the mantle of accomplished old-timers.

It’s why ‘talent’ on movie sets or backstage at arenas have a rider; that list of exact provisions that must greet their arrival. Madonna famously demanded pink and white roses with their stems cut to six inches, 20 international phone lines and her own furniture to replace what was in the green room. Grace Jones demanded six bottles of Louis Roederer Cristal, six bottles each of French red and white wine and two dozen Colchester or Fine de Claire oysters; unshucked but with an oyster knife to hand as she liked to do it herself.

Such largesse enables stars to feel at home. The familiarity means they can focus on the job in hand, be it spouting Shakespeare or hitting those high notes.

I once stayed in King Charles’ holiday home in Romania, a sweet place you can rent for a remote holiday. Yes, he brings with him a doctor, chef and some pals, but it was the Highgrove soap, I noted, that added some home comfort. Doubtless he has a routine: breakfast, a walk, a little work at the large outdoor wooden table with a view of the flowering meadows, some painting, then a light lunch.

I’ve long been a Gina Ford obsessive (which makes me a controversial dinner party guest from hell). I swear by her routines for newborns – which take them from contented baby to contented child (to routine-obsessed adult). As babies react well to a routine, we too find comfort in habits, old and new.

So what of the Monday night dinner party? Well, I threw caution to the wind. Up on Exmoor, Robin and Paola are famous hosts with a beautiful cottage at the end of a very long drive at a place called Throat Farm. They threw a multi-course Italian feast of lobster, lamb cutlets, salads of bulbous burrata cheese and vast tomatoes with single estate olive oils and aged balsamic, of meringue kisses, sweet basil leaf ice cream, of peaches and biscotti.

I’m yet to recover. Utterly discombobulated. Never again.