THAT hole in the ozone layer must be right above Scotland, Gus the Guru says. The sky's been leaking on us for months. We're all too dispirited to question his grasp of physics. We're trying to avoid looking at the windows because they give you a sense of being surrounded by water. It's like drinking in an aquarium. I notice that Greyman is putting less water in his whisky. He's probably getting more than enough by osmosis.

Even our spirits are dank. You can't hide from climate. You may defy it with double glazing and central heating or by convening in The Jury Room but your very act of defiance will become an acknowledgement of it. In a world that runs largely on hype, at least weather keeps telling the truth. No matter how many optimism exercises you do from your latest book on positive thinking, it will still pee on your head when you walk out the door.

If the climate you live in is Scotland's, you're in a place where it's difficult to sustain fey and wistful attitudes to life. They keep bumping into the weather. Even the traditional poetic songs to the seasons can shift key into irony very suddenly here, where spring may be indicated by the warmth of the rain and summer by the fact that it isn't snowing.

Our mood is always likely to be ambushed by the contradictions of the weather. I remember, when I was teaching in secondary school, the French assistant came into the staff room one day from his lunchtime walk. He looked puzzled, as if he didn't know what to feel. Weellee, he said. What is happening here? The sun is shining brightly and it is raining. I suggested that Heinz had the contract for manufacturing our weather and that they liked to cram as many varieties as they could into every day.

And if our moods are ambushed

enough by the weather, this may eventually congeal into a partial determination of the national character.

Imagine two bus-stops in September. One is in Edinburgh, one in Rome. Four or five people are standing at each bus-stop. The people in each group are chatting among themselves. The Edinburgh people are talking out of the sides of their mouths. They stand like plaster casts of people. A shrug constitutes an elaborate gesture. The people in Rome have open mouths, their heads move freely. Their arms are waving in wild gesticulation. They look like an opera without the music. Why do the Romans talk with their mouths open and spread their arms so carelessly? Because they have no fear that, if they open their mouths, their lips will get chapped or that, if they spread their arms, one of them may snap off in the cold.

No wonder the Scots have acquired a certain hard-headedness. It probably keeps their brain cells from being washed away and their frontal lobes from freezing. And, while it can sometimes make them overly sceptical of some of the more fanciful contemporary ideas, that probably isn't the worst fault to have in these times that commonly see attitude mistaken for intelligence and the triumph of image over substance.

I'm thinking this as lamentation over the summer that never was leads on to thoughts of other places. It will be a long time to the next holiday. Maybe we should start looking at the brochures. But then what do the brochures give you? Too often reality as theme park. Images that should be sued under the Trades Description Act. Haven't we often booked a photograph in Technicolor and found when we got there that it had been covering the holiday equivalent of a hole in the wall?

Tunisia, Karma Chameleon says. (Her latest boyfriend isn't with her tonight, something which most of us hope will become a permanent arrangement.) I mean, it may be a great place but not the time we went. This was a while ago. I was still married.

A traveller's tale unfolds, an account of one of those experiences that leave you brooding in some hell-hole for a fortnight that feels like a millennium, meticulously rehearsing the moment when you will walk into the travel agent's and strangle that grinning bastard behind the computer.

(With all the counselling that goes on these days, why hasn't someone set up to specialise in counselling returning travellers, traumatised by yet another disastrous holiday? If you set up your office in an airport, you'll make a fortune, offering a special group rate for counselling entire families, who will sit staring vacantly at you, shell-shocked and sunburnt. And if you do, charge double for the mothers. They're the ones who will have suffered most and, therefore, will need most work done on them.)

It seems that Karma and her husband Andrew and their daughter Sophie (they only have one child at this time) book a holiday in what looks like a fabulous hotel in Tunisia. Maybe it's the advances made in cameras and photographic film but isn't it weird how many photographs these days seem to have been taken with what you might call the Renoir lens? Everything comes out so cosmeticised.

You take a photograph of a pit bing and it comes out like Mount Fujiyama at the summer solstice. Having seen an estate agent's brochure, you rush to view the reality and discover that the lounge which looked like a baronial hall has turned into a phonebox with curtains.

Or, as in Karma's case, you see an odd-angled shot of an impressive hotel against bright blue sky and you have a subliminal flash of the lifestyle of the rich and famous. When you get there, you wonder how it has turned into - as Karma says - a dead ringer for a Glasgow high-rise. It looks, she claims, about as impressive as Queen Elizabeth Square before they demolished it. It would have been more impressive as Queen Elizabeth Square after they demolished it. But then so was Queen Elizabeth Square.

The interior isn't any better. Karma says the atmosphere inside is how she imagines an asylum might be, a kind of muted environment for the mentally insecure - which is perhaps an acceptable, rough definition of those who believe in brochures. Long corridors wander into the semi-dark, lit by

lights so dim as to suggest it's better not to see too clearly where you are going. When they reach their rooms on the top floor, costing extra and described in the brochure as the luxury apartments, Karma's sense of disorientation is not diminished. If this is luxury, she is wondering what the Tunisian concept of grottiness must be like.

The view is wonderful, it's true - beneath cloudless blue sky, a golden beach fretted by water of an azure no photograph could exaggerate. But that's from umpteen floors up. Maybe it was from here they took the photograph.

For, once Karma and her family come down to the reality that is the beach, they discover that nearness doesn't make the heart grow fonder. For a start, the beach is a throughway for a seemingly endless caravan of camels, apparently the Tunisian variant of the donkeys at Largs. Apart from the discomfort of feeling that you're trying to sunbathe on the Golden Road to Samarkand, the camels insist on leaving something for the tourists all along the beach. Camel shit, it seems, is no more fragrant than any other kind.

The best thing might be to head for the water, except that you can't do that.

As you take your first, acclimatising lounge on the beach, waiting to get warm enough to make the water refreshing and making sure you're not using a piece of warm camel dung as a headrest, you become aware that the beach is full of the agonised screams of newcomers like yourself and of the blurred images of their panicked flight back up the beach from the water. As they pass, like figures fast-forwarded on a video, you notice odd, vividly red marks on their legs, like serial cigarette burns.

You learn that between you and

that tantalisingly blue water, like organic barbed wire running the length of

the beach, there are jellyfish in the shallows. They seem so continuous they might as well be doing the jellyfish equivalent of linking arms. The sea is out of bounds to all but masochists and Karma isn't one.

She spends a fortnight staring at a glorious sea that might as well be in Marbella and trying to ensure that Sophie isn't stung to death. She will return with a lovely tan on her back.

The food is no consolation. The contents of the couscous, Karma suspects, are collected from the beach, once the camels have gone. Also, the hotel seems to run a very rigid system at meals, rather like school dinners. They do one serving only, by room number. This means that if Andrew comes down first and is finished by the time Karma arrives, the table has been cleared and she gets no food.

This proves to be a particular problem since she and Andrew fall out spectacularly and can hardly bear to be in each other's company. Isn't it interesting how often couples who can muddle along, with a kind of mutual tolerance, for the rest of the year want to kill each other when they go on holiday? I think it's because routine can mask so much. When you break the routine, the masks are off and each comes face-to-face with a lunatic stranger.

Karma comes home thin and thinking of filing for divorce. The only plus is that

she thinks she might market her new slimming method - The Tunisian Diet she thinks she'll call it.

Others in The Jury Room are now queuing up to make their holiday confessions, like people who have seen the light at a revivalist meeting. Mary Contrary wants to tell us about Corfu. Dave the Rave says he has a cracker about a holiday in a caravan park in Northern Spain.

But this will have to suffice for now, dear reader. Perhaps another time we may return to hear more tales of the travelling disaffected. But we have already heard enough to remind us that Scottish hard-headedness, born in part from our strange climate, will export well and that it is not entirely a negative thing.

It enables us to mock our own ill-founded expectations and, therefore, not to pretend that things are better than they are nor to expect delivery on promises that are patently empty. These are not inconsiderable virtues in these dishonest and often positively deranged times when, for example, new religions can spring up overnight like poisonous toadstools which the gullible mistake for magic mushrooms and eagerly devour.