Dubai

• The Pleasure Domes - Abu Dhabi
• The butler did it - Bahrain
• Dazzled by Dubai - Dubai
• Dubai’s must-do half dozen - Dubai
• The Day Chris tried to swap me for a camel - Egypt
• Ten great wonders - Egypt
• Keeping up with the Joneses - Jordan
• You CAN afford star treatment… - Middle East
• The hippy haunts of Hendrix - Morocco
• Souks you, sir! - Morocco
• Travelling in the sands of time - Oman
• OMAN! What a desert oasis - Oman

DEFINE 'HOLIDAY'. IF YOU DON'T have children, the words peace, relaxation, luxury and adventure probably spring to mind. If you do, your definition may go something like this – pool shallow enough not to drown a three-year-old, kids club that opens before midday and pasta on the menu. Always.

Having children changes you – and your holidays. Those wrought-iron spiral stairs in your Tuscan villa suddenly transform from a charming feature into potential disaster for little Ella. The possibility of isolated peace and contemplation morphs into two weeks of constant whingeing that ‘there’s nothing to do’ from sports-mad pre-pubescent Will.

After my first holiday as an adult with children I got back home and immediately phoned my Mum to apologise. “Why?” she asked. “Well, I’ve only just realised that for our entire childhood you and Dad never actually had what most reasonable people would describe as ‘a holiday’.”

Rosé at lunchtime

You know the sort of thing – sitting for a couple of hours in the shade of a friendly tree reading a book, enjoying a silent stroll through an orange grove with nothing but your thoughts for company, drinking more rosé at lunchtime than is entirely sensible in 30 degrees of heat. You know, A HOLIDAY.

The arrival of children, yours or someone else’s, changes all that. Expectations of foraging through street markets or seeing master-pieces in out-of-the-way galleries are abandoned, replaced by the need to find rooms with interconnecting doors (you don’t expect a full night’s uninterrupted sleep do you?) and close proximity to things called waterparks.

Unless you assess your needs and those of your children carefully and honestly and work out how to please them as well as yourself, you are in for two weeks of expensive misery.

But prayers do get answered. This last trip ended with me a good deal less tired, grumpy and baggy-eyed than it started.

For the second year running my husband and I took three children, aged between three and ten, to Dubai.

We stayed at The Royal Mirage Resort, operated by the One & Only group. Among others, Sol Kerzner’s company also runs Le Touessrok and Le Saint Geran in Mauritius, Ocean club in the Bahamas and Palmilla in Mexico.

So, clearly, the group is used to fussy customers and can do luxury. Adding children to the mix is tricky. Not only do you have to keep the families happy but also an atmosphere has to be maintained that will allow guests without little darlings to enjoy their break largely unaffected by noise and messy dining rooms.

The Royal Mirage Resort offers three choices of hotel. The largest is The Palace with 25 rooms. In the entrance courtyard is a gleaming, golden sculpture depicting life-size Arabs in full majestic robes astride galloping camels. Blimey.

This is as flashy as it gets. One of my reservations before I went to Dubai was that the entire experience would be characterised by the sort over-the-top opulence that can make you feel queasy after ten minutes, never mind ten days.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s no shortage of places to stay if your tastes run to gold taps, pink-veined marble and synchronised dancing fountains.

Intimate sanctuary

The Royal mirage, even with its one golden sculpture, is thankfully nothing like that.

Sitting within the confines of the Mirage complex and next door to The Palace is the smallest and most intriguing hotel on offer. The Residence & Spa sits back from the beach, nestling behind abundant foliage and almost hidden from view, A member of the prestigious Leading Small Hotels of the World group, it’s described as an ‘intimate sanctuary for those who wish to languish in comfort.

The Residence & Spa has suites and 32 ‘prestige’ rooms. Each has a sea view private balcony or garden. Unlike the rest of the resort, guests from the two other hotels aren’t allowed to come and use the facilities.

The Residence is much quieter and grown-up, with very few children. There are no set hours for dining, with a chef happy to prepare what ever you want whenever you want.

The interior is also spot-on - a sort of pared down, low-key opulence that whispers rather than screams ‘cash’.

The third and newest of the hotels at The Royal Mirage is The Arabian Court. With 162 rooms and ten suites, this is as small as big hotels get, managing to combine scale and choice with a degree of intimacy.

We stayed with the children in one of the suites. Although obviously more expensive, this gave us flexibility when it came to homework, bedtime stories and in-room dining (room service in old money). The rooms are big and plush with fantastic bathrooms and seriously comfortable beds.

In addition, the Royal Mirage has what all family friendly hotels have these days, a kids’ club. These are magic words that can offer exhausted parents some hope that a chapter of their novel may actually get read or a blissful massage won’t be just a distant dream.

At the Royal Mirage the kids’ club opens at 10.30am each day and offers everything from henna hand-painting to camel rides. It’s well organised, properly supervised and, what’s more, the children seemed really to enjoy it.

There are kids’ lunches and dinners too. The choices were freshly made, not last night’s adult leftovers and, yes, there was some kind of pasta on the menu every day.

Another Royal Mirage favourite with our little ones was the cookies-and-milk hour on offer each evening in the kids’ club at 8pm, cleverly timed to let Mummy blow-dry her holiday-frizzed hair in peace. Well done, whoever came up with that one. A baby-sitting service is also available.

Family friendly affair

One and Only have actually managed to create a pleasantly schizophrenic resort. By day it is a low-key, upmarket family friendly affair, but at night it turns into a very grown-up hotspot with seriously good restaurants and a clutch of sexy bars.

The Rooftop Lounge is open-air and scattered with lanterns and huge Moroccan cushions. With its wafts of incense and some very funky Buddha Bar sounds, it proved our favourite spot for pre and indeed post-dinner drinks, apart from one occasion – Hijri, the Islamic New Year’s Day, which meant there was no alcohol served publicly or entertainment, including music, for a full 24 hours.

This didn’t spoil our holiday one bit and simply proved a good opportunity to order room service and sit on our own very private and very large balcony and enjoy the silence and the twinkling lights beyond.

Its worth noting that Dubai, the second largest of the United Arab Emirates, is by its neighbours’ standards a very liberal Islamic state and the many Dubai residents who come to enjoy what the hotel has to offer in the evenings betray no signs of disapproval at the way western guests choose to relax.

The resort also scores well with its choice of restaurants, most of which manage to avoid that deadly hotel dining room atmosphere – over-lit unatmospheric carpeted carveries. We ate one of the best Indian meals we’ve ever had at a place called Nina’s, a magnificently designed restaurant that could easily give any of London’s fashionable eateries a run for their money.

At Eau Zone (yes I know the name’s duff but concentrate on the fabulous setting and the food) we sampled gulf shrimp and kobi beef from a theatrical teppanyaki grill.

Also worthy of note is a traditional Moroccan-influenced place called Tagine, and The Beachside Bar & Grill, where you must be sure to specify an outside table when you book.

Ah yes, booking ahead. It’s worth remembering that at busy times like half-term you’ll need to be organised and work out when you want to play tennis, where you want to eat and which treatments you want in the traditional hamam, or Turkish bath.

If you don’t, the whole family could end up grumpier than a toddler in Tuscany.