Mummy's waxed and ready to go

Tomorrow, I'll be on my holi-bobs. And I can't wait. It's the first time I've been on a big holiday since I founded my PR company, and it's been a flat-out few weeks to complete everything I needed to, bearing in mind I don't intend to be working from the Maldives.

I'm fairly well prepared. The spare room has been off limits to the family for the last week while I lay out the packing. And I've already got the mini-RMs' case sorted, packed like a jenga masterpiece with all the vulnerable items cushioned within using a micro-packing system that has taken the internet by storm.

I haven't weighed it yet.

I've invested in a couple of new bikini bottoms to wear with my tankini, packed my sparkly flip-flops (don't panic, I've also packed some wicked wedges, I've not gone completely heel-free) and primped to the point of as-near-to-perfection as I can manage. It's DIY beauty remember.

Why the hell we've booked the Maldives, I don't know. We do this every year - yearn after somewhere warm, then I spend the holiday leaking sweat like a slow-leak from every pore.

I don't sweat well. I don't mean it's a particularly ugly sight, I mean I don't like it. On reflection, it's probably safe to say that my resistance to sweating is the only thing that has stood between me and a phenomenal tennis career for GB.

Take this summer, which we have to admit has been glorious. Even the biblical rain we experienced earlier this week was a blessing. This summer has been far hotter than those I remember as a child, and everything feels damp and sticky - I guess that, given my fingertips seem to be perspiring, anything I touch is automatically rendered tacky. And all this during a summer of hot flushes too. It seems so unfair somehow.

There is another reason I've been sweating though, and it's down to Her Majesty's Passport Office.

OK, I did have a teeny-tiny part to play in events, but as the seventh or eighth person I spoke to last week said, thousands upon thousands of people make mistakes on the forms. I'd applied in plenty of time to receive the renewed passports for micro-RM and me but I'd got confused in my position as applicant on her behalf and put "friend" instead of "mother" on the form. The days til our departure were gathering speed, whipping past and still, no passport.

Mine arrived, which was sod all use without hers, but there was still no sign of hers.

I wasn't sleeping, the stress of whether or not the passport would be here in time was so bad my tummy was in turmoil, I couldn't even contemplate thinking about packing in case micro-RM and I couldn't go. There was a moment of heart-stopping anticipation on Wednesday, when a passport-office envelope arrived with a passport in, but it turned out to be my old one. I could have wept. I did weep.

Then on Thursday, things started to get a bit better.

I received a call back from HMPO (several requests later) by a lady who sounded as disinterested in my plight as it is possible to be, but who confirmed that I had met the criteria for an upgrade - basically paying the passport office another fee almost double the original passport costs to move the printing and possession along. As soon as they took the fee they would process the passport and four hours later it could be collected. From London. I could feel the stress melting away.

But it wasn't possible to take the money there and then - it was 4pm and accounts had gone home. So she promised me a call first thing Friday morning, and between us we arranged with the London office and my London-based husband to do the collection, and the money was debited.

So in the baking heat of last Friday afternoon, my husband battled crowds and the Tube and potential sun-stroke to make his way to the passport office by Victoria Station, armed with his passport and a letter from me confirming he could pick the passport up and vague hopes of an early weekend.

And that should have been that. Except it wasn't. Because they refused to give him the passport. Because the signature wasn't "wet". There's irony in that, somehow, somewhere, but my sense of humour quailed in direct proportion to the rate at which his sense of humour failed. I worked the phones this end, pleading, crying, belligerent and eventually a combination of my perseverance and his presence worked. They released the passport and he only had to negotiate the rail journey home.

But get it, he did. It's sitting next to me as I type. Along with three others that I continually check. So now the formation of sweat on my brow will be limited to either the result of dragging a case the weight of a middle-aged elephant, the anxiety I feel placing all I hold dear in the hands of a stranger pilot, and that completely unnecessary but apparently quite common guilt that takes hold of me when walking through Nothing to Declare.

Other than that, I'm ready to go. Don't panic if you don't hear from me for a while.

Me xx