A DAD'S LIFE: I want to just stay home but am outvoted by little people
SOME PEOPLE do holidays well. They take off for their destination, arrive and launch into their new environs with the enthusiasm of a bunch of arts students locked in a cider factory.
I’m not one of those people. In an ideal world, the first three days of any holiday would involve lying in bed as a sort of antechamber between the real world and vacation world. I can’t switch from one to the other any faster and, when forced to, adopt a defensive posture until I’m accustomed to my altered circumstances. This involves being Grinchy about everything new (food, beds, temperature, whatever) until some semblance of acclimatisation is reached.
Because the world is now so small, most places you travel to have little culture-shock effect. Jumping Ryanair to the Costa Brava isn’t going to provide any wonderment at a new world, so I have long become accustomed to these first three days being my body’s way of throwing off real world and real time. That’s what it takes. I like my own bed and get twitchy away from it.
So it is with real trepidation that I agree to a week on a campsite in Kerry as our family escape this year. Really, what is the point of my three days of prologue misery, only to come to and realise we’re in more or less the same place as where we live all year round? Except we’ve been crowbarred into a small box for the pleasure. I argue for staying home, but am assaulted from all sides with pleas for a change and whoops of joyous anticipation at the prospect of time in a mobile home. My family is populated by morons.
Here is the point where I’m supposed to have my Damascene revelation. Here is where I shriek from the rooftops that the tin box changed my life, brought us together, opened my eyes to the glory of nature and the humanity of togetherness. But no. We are in a tin box and I want to cry for most of it. The sun shines occasionally, it spits rain a lot, but most of all cold and damp threaten when they aren’t actually present. It’s Ireland – you know the drill.
Okay, slap self and get positive, put aside the claustrophobia and the poxy weather and soak in the splendour of Killarney. We spend an afternoon renting bikes and cycling round the lakes, stopping off for lunch at Muckross House. It is amazing. For a number of reasons I’ve been in Killarney four times this summer, but never once before took a breath to marvel at the surroundings. The missus, bless her, winds up having to tow the younger in one of those bike buggies. The route is hilly, but she puts her back into it. That night she sleeps the sleep of the blessed. Before she passes out she mumbles something about it being an unforgettable day, and she may have been right.
And that, I realise, is the secret of the campsite. It forces you to get out. For a small fee you get a patch of land to call your own. For a little more you get a roof over your head. Neither encourages you to stay put so you do more than you usually would. Once I’m over my three-day Grinch period I put a halt to the moaning and begin to get involved.
We swim, play tennis, walk, cycle some more. With better hair and skin we could be one of those families in the brochures. We eat together and crash together. The kids roam by themselves without fear of annoying anyone or getting in trouble. In fact, they can join the gang of other feral pre-teens already roaming the avenues of the campsite.
I would still like the walls of an actual building to cosset me, would still appreciate a warm Mediterranean breeze and a plate of fresh sardines on a whitewashed stone terrace. Wouldn’t mind escaping the leash and hitting the sangria. But this is pretty good. This type of holiday is cheap and easy, kid-friendly and manageable, and that is about as much as you can hope for in the area of brat entertainment. Once they’re happy, you’re happy. If they dared bitch and moan like I’ve been guilty of, there would be killings.
All the same, there are Kerry flags everywhere. I can’t help but daydream about a football team in blue stuffing these boys in September. Every year I daydream about this and every year I’m disappointed, only this year the possibility has lasted a little longer. This year things might go our way. I’d happily revisit Killarney then, tent or no tent.