According to the experts, and they must be right – after all they are experts – this week was due to be 2012’s most miserable.

Our post-Christmas depression was set to reach a crescendo with the thud of the credit card bill hitting the doormat.

Mind you, as a professional grump, I like to think I keep stable levels of misery bubbling under the surface all year round.

To fight this so called “Blue Monday” my mind turned towards warmer weather and exotic climes. I haven’t been on a foreign vacation for ages. Why? Well I’m not a huge fan of flying. What normal person happily entrusts their life at 30,000 feet to the equivalent of a huge coke can?

Even before you get on the plane there is the rigmarole of the airport. It’s a place that causes me confusion, guilt and a suspended sense of reality.

Firstly, there’s the guilt. As I pass through check-in, on to passport control and finally security, I always experience progressive waves of guilt.

I’ve done nothing wrong, I wouldn’t dream of doing so. I’m no drug mule, I wouldn’t even take a pair of nail clippers in my hand luggage.

Yet somehow the officials stare straight into the deepest, darkest parts of my subconscious, seeing the guilt that all good Jewish boys feel about, well, pretty much everything.

Then there’s confusion.

A duty free bookshop makes perfect sense. Somewhere to get a last-minute souvenir, or even a place to buy perfume for the mistress I understand, but a luggage shop?

If you’re in Duty Free your belongings are already on the plane. You don’t have any reason for a suitcase, and what’s more you couldn’t take it onboard as hand luggage if you wanted to...

Yet my stay-at-home attitude is mainly down to an expired passport.

So why not renew? It’s not just the £75 cost but crucially the passport photo. I know they are not designed to offer a flattering portrait, but does it have to be quite so repugnant?! For 10 long years you have to suffer with it.

Nonetheless off I toddled to the photo booth, but after one look at the end result I decided a serious diet was needed before I could subject the world to my official image.

That was 22 months ago. Admittedly, I might have started the diet a little earlier than now.

It also takes me forever to decide where I want to go and which hotel to pick. I’m rubbish at making decisions. I’m the annoying man at the front of the queue in the coffee shop umming and aahing over the merits of a Choco mock flap chino versus a rosemary-infused caramel Grande latte.

What I really need in life is someone there to make all the difficult decisions for me, and before I resort to a cheap jibe about my ex-girlfriend, I . . . oh wait.

No, that was exactly what I was going to do.