VACATION TRIPS are troublesome enough at the best of times, what with getting gnawed by insects that look like invaders from the planet Zog, guaranteed attacks of the green apple quickstep and a wife who can't read road maps. What I don't need are phone calls from a whining refrigerator or grumpy boiler or ailing air conditioner back home.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not against scientific progress. After all, without it there would be no television to curse over the 16th repeat of the "Frasier" episode in which Roz got him a blind date, no train to be canceled because of the wrong sort of leaves on the line, no way for cousin Festus to phone for help in getting him sprung from the Juarez jail.

These things are undoubtedly necessary for the progress of humankind and all that rot. I go along with it all because I am that sort of guy - besides which, not to do so is about as useful as doing a wee-wee into the wind after an evening of marathon beer drinking.

Nor am I a Luddite. As you probably know, but more probably don't, Luddites (named after a Leicestershire lad named Ned Lud, who had a gripe about things down at the local hosiery mill) were 18th century textile workers who took to wrecking the machines that were putting them out of their jobs.

I'm certainly not in favor of going around destroying knitting frames or bread slicers or roulette wheels in the interest of halting the machinery of science (although I do feel that a squirt of superglue or a bucketful of sand in the works now and again would not be amiss).

But sometimes there is a sense that science is getting a bit too big for its britches. I call Allen Yurko, an engineer whose dream - or nightmare, depending upon definition - is of a future in which factories and homes would be run via the Internet.

He has a company called Invensys, and he wants to use its know-how to link systems that control household services such as electricity, water and gas to the World Wide Web and produce something called the "smart home." The key to this is an "Internet-configured" mobile phone.

Yurko waxes poetic: "You may be sitting on a beach on holiday and realize that you have forgotten to turn off the air conditioning. So you call up your home and tell the system what you want." For good measure, "your fridge or boiler will be linked to the Internet, so remote meter-readings and maintenance will be possible."

And if something goes wrong, says Yurko, "you will get a call saying your boiler is running below par and needs to be fixed before you even know there is a problem." I suspect Dr. Frankenstein was of a similarly optimistic bent as he started connecting the neck bone to the thigh bone, thigh bone to the ankle bone. . .

In other words, your "smart home" will start speaking its mind, and you will be expected to listen up.

The last thing I want as I lie amid the beer cans and Big Mac debris at some dreary beach on one of those three days that passes for summer in Britain, battling the indigenous pest population, is a phone call from a bellyaching boiler complaining about the limescale on its coils, or the timer has packed up, or a switch is stuck "and it's hot as blazes in here.

" i.e. Planned obsolescence being the fine art that it has become, I can then expect a phone call 18 minutes later from my refrigerator: "My thermostat is having palpitations and I need a triple bypass, you left a can of cat food open and it stinks like hell in here, and I can't get a minute's sleep because the blasted light between my shelves stays on."

Of course, the toilet is not to be outdone. Now that I've repaired to the beachfront pub to ponder my boiler and fridge problems, Arthur (that's my crapper's name) will surely phone in as I reach for my fourth large whisky:

"I don't know what it's like on your bleeding beach, but summer's over here, it's blowing up a gale, snow is forecast before nightfall, and here I am, my water tank ready to host the Olympic ice skating championships, and I'm freezing my ballcock off. Whaddya gonna do about it?"

Another round, barkeep.

If Allen Yurko and his ilk have their way, you and your home will become inextricably intwined, never to be parted by distance, and you are about to find how the Ancient Mariner felt about that albatross, or Jacob Marley about all those chains, or former President Bush's son Shrub about any questions involving foreign leaders.

I thought the main purpose of any vacation or holiday was to put as many miles or 1.6 times as many kilometers between ourselves and the baggage, impedimenta and just plain junk that we drag along like so many balls and chains through the halls of the penitentiary we call everyday life.

Which is why I can never comprehend the mindset of anyone who sets out on vacation with three tons of ratty belongings dumped into a chemical toilet on wheels called a trailer. I'd rather suntan my derriere with a blowtorch.

Meanwhile, if folks like Allen Yurko are really hell-bent on adding to the U.S. Patent Office's mountain, there's lots of stuff out there left to be invented, like a solar-powered flashlight or a silent alarm clock or glow-in-the-dark sunglasses, all of which would be environmentally friendly to that increasingly rare commodity, privacy.

As for my wife Elizabeth and me, we are off soon for a four-day vacation in Wales, a land of Arthurian legend and coal mines and villages full of "f's" and "l's" and "y's" in their generally unpronounceable names.

And if our gas stove wants to get in touch, it can leave a message on the answerphone.

Thought for the Week: Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.

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