A DAD'S LIFE:At last, I am going on holiday to do things I want to do
KIDS, YOU may have noticed, can affect your social life. They require time and occasional attention. They don’t want to do the things you want to do, and often you’d rather not do their thing. Indoor jungle gym on a sweltering Saturday afternoon with the decibel level set to pneumatic drill? Anyone?
One of the first casualties of reproduction is the holiday. I was going to qualify ‘holiday’ with an adjective: ‘interesting’, ‘educational’, even ‘activity’, but the type of holiday that is now unattainable to you, as a parent to young children, is irrelevant. The fact is, for a few years, they are no longer holidays. Rather they become trips away from your area of comfort where you are available, 24/7, to the barking demands of your ungrateful offspring. Holidays are more demanding than work, you pay for the privilege of a sweaty tent on a campsite in windswept Normandy and don’t sleep for a fortnight. You may find solace in more single malt than you should, but the resulting banger behind the eyes only serves to reinforce the horror that awaits each morning.
On holiday you have over-exposure to your own brood, and soon their new-found friends for life decide also to start clambering all over your prostrate form. You think if you lie still by the pool and sip your Tequila Sunrise through the crook of your arm they won’t notice you. Wrong. They identify you as an inert water float that hasn’t paid its dues.
Holidays are not about rest and relaxation anymore. They are about your abuse, physically and financially. They require travel, often crossing international borders. This involves running the gauntlet of security checks and mile-long queues for passport control. Being treated like a terrorist because you forgot you had an ancient 250ml bottle of Brut in your washbag may be deserved in fashion circles, but it does no favours to the humour you need to maintain to survive familial travel squalls.
As you’re frogmarched to a steel-walled room with the offending green plastic bottle waved in the air as evidence, you will hear your children’s screams of rage because you have inconvenienced them with your bad taste in cologne. And those children will make you pay in ways that will make the customs officer’s attention seem favourable. Yes, family holidays are not for the faint-hearted.
And then one day you will wake up and be as excited as I am as I type this because you will be going on holiday to somewhere you want to see, to do things you want to do. You know you’re going to be able to eat food you enjoy and wash it down with whatever you fancy because you won’t be bounced awake with the milkman. Even if your brats do wake at the crack of dawn, they would rather entertain themselves and each other than have you growling round the place. Unfortunately, lying, marinading, in your pit all day is not an option as there will have been negotiations made for activities for that day, but negotiations made on the basis that you will be left unsullied at least for the early part of the morning.
The realisations on this morning are many and wonderful. First, you are comfortable in the act of negotiation with your kids because they now possess the ability to rationalise and even, occasionally, see another person’s perspective. No longer is the screaming tantrum the only weapon in their armoury. They have also begun to understand the notion of deferred gratification. And their delayed gratification is your extra hour in bed.
Most significantly, you realise that for this brief period your interests have collided. As you regress and seek out pleasures that you feel may have been denied in your own childhood, you hit a place where you get the same kicks as your (usually) pre-teen children. Once again waterparks, themeparks, zoos and marinas begin to hold the same attraction as they once did before nightclubs and the pursuit of loose women became all-encompassing. You grab this shared time because soon they’ll be making excuses not to slope off for candyfloss with you. As suddenly as your cycles have aligned, theirs will speed up as yours winds down. But their running off on the pillion seat of some tattooed coke dealer is down the track, for now we’re leaving on a jet plane and we’re rather excited.