SENIOR Son has been to Venice. "Venice?" I asked in astonishment. Well, squawked in disbelief really.

This is the lad whose ideal holiday usually includes no more than sun, sea, loud music and vast amounts of lager (and probably other things he doesn't tell his mother about). What would he do in the Queen of the Adriatic, with all those wonderful old buildings, palazzos, churches, galleries?

But he has a friend who has a brother studying there, so off they went on a whim, a tax rebate and an £80 return from Stansted. I was horribly jealous, Venice being one of my favourite places in the world.

Before he went I dug out my guide books and explained lovingly about San Marco, the Doge's Palace, Santi Giovanni e Paolo, the Accademia, the...

"I just need to find the clubs," said the lad, leaving the guide books unopened.

"Clubs? In Venice? I don't suppose there are any," I said.

There is one. And he found it. He also found the only Irish pub in Venice. It was there that he watched the England Pakistan cricket match in the company of two Pakistani lads and some Finnish girls. He tried to explain to the Finnish girls the rules of cricket. In German.

Cosmopolitan or what?

Actually, it doesn't matter where Senior Son goes, his holidays always reduce me to states of nervous exhaustion. He went skiing three times, twice he wrecked his knee, once so badly that we had a consultant standing by for us to whisk the lad straight to the Friarage Hospital. He was on crutches for months after that.

Then there was the time he lost his wallet within hours of arriving in Corfu. He ended that holiday locked in a hotel manager's office trying to get two of his friends out of jail. If you've got a day to spare, I'll tell you the story.

So you can see, my panic is rooted in experience.

And having exerted himself to find the flight and train tickets (£80 to fly to Venice, £48 for the cheapest train tickets to Stansted), he then collapsed into inertia. Half an hour before his train went, he had neither insurance, an E111, nor Italian money, which meant a mad dash to the Post Office while I sat in the car on double yellow lines, panicking, and he drifted dreamily in to sort things out.

"At the very least, he'll fall into a canal," I said to his father.

But no. He returned home on time a week later, suntanned, with dark glasses and a new jacket looking, well, briefly, foreign.

No he hadn't been inside a church or a palazzo or a gallery. Yes, he put his head round the door of St Marks, but there were too many people in there.

He hadn't been on a gondola (thank goodness, far too expensive) but he'd used the vaporetti and tragehtti, had eaten all sorts of delicious Italian food and drunk gallons of strong espresso (probably to mop up the Italian wines and beers). He'd been to the Lido and Treviso, wandered round the city, met lots of Italians ( as well as Pakistanis and Finns), had got to know the Venetian character and seen a side of the city that most tourists never do.

What' s more, he liked it. And something must have rubbed off because he announced proudly, "I'm dead cultured me, now like."

Ah yes, the magic effect of travel...