ROMANCE in a relationship is a bit like an expensive, hand-made rug. It's easy to keep when there are only two of you, but it can suffer badly from exposure to small children. Many parents put it away somewhere safe for a few a years while the family is young. But the danger is that when the children are reared, the couple will have forgotten that they ever had a rug, or where they put it, writes FRANK McNALLY.
A key barometer of romance levels in a relationship, I used to think, is foreign travel. Prior to parenthood, I had never been on a package holiday, and I was determined not to start now. Spontaneity was my byword: the last-minute flight booking; the charming hotel discovered during a stroll; the chance meeting with interesting strangers. Also, I liked to travel light. Being a father wouldn't change this, I thought.
On a first family trip to Venice, I booked us all into an old hotel that looked charming in the pictures. And right enough, it was lovely. But perhaps noting that we were Irish and had a baby, the management reserved us a room in which everything, including the doors, was covered in bright green wallpaper. We'd been hoping for something with faded grandeur. Instead, it was like St Patrick's Day in a creche.
Despite this early setback, we had a great trip. Such was its success that a few months later, undaunted, we set off for a week in Vienna and Budapest. Truth to tell, we were slightly daunted. Our daughter was on the verge of toddlerdom now, and soon to be joined by a baby brother, although we sincerely hoped he wouldn't be joining us during the holiday.
We had enough stresses already. Our first-born was going through a phase in which she seemed to throw up every hour, yet in such a way that it was always a surprise. On the flight to Vienna, we were as edgy as if we'd been sitting next to a passenger with a fuse in his shoe. It was tense on the ground too. By a stroke of luck, when the baby finally did throw up the first night, it was in the bath - the only wipeable surface in the hotel room.
Unfortunately, this being Vienna, we had to leave our hotel at some stage and visit a succession of famous old cafés: the former haunts of revolutionaries and intellectuals, where the floors and walls were redolent with history. Anxious that they wouldn't be redolent with anything else when we left, we always sat near the door so that we could grab the baby and run at a moment's notice.
The worst bit was the flight home, which was the sort of thing that makes parents with small children so popular with other passengers. The baby cried constantly, except for a brief interlude during which she paused to be sick all over the seat.
Finally I calmed her by carrying her up and down the aisle and, seeing the front-row seats unoccupied, sat down there and nursed her to sleep. Peace returned. The other passengers stopped radiating hatred. I slipped on a seat-belt, attached the baby's belt to mine, and relaxed. Then, as we began our descent, a female crew-member explained that we couldn't sit there during the landing. It was against the rules, apparently: we had to return to our own seats.
I gingerly unfastened my seat-belt and then the baby's, desperate not to wake her. But it was no use. She went off like a fire alarm. By the time we landed, I was still so preoccupied trying to pacify her that neither of us had a belt on. Somehow, the stewardess did not point this rule-breach out, because she was now busy keeping the full length of the plane between herself and us.
ANOTHER family travel problem, we gradually realised, was the hotel room. However bland they may be - and by now we were bypassing the "charming" section of the accommodations in favour of "contains nothing breakable" - hotel rooms offer the same excitement to children as playgrounds. Every new bed promises a different bouncing experience, and underneath, a novel variety of dust.
Adults arrive in a hotel room needing to lie down, whereas children are re-energised. When a hotel gave us two adjoining rooms once, because they had no family-sized ones available, it took the kids hours to get over the excitement of knowing that, by including the corridor, they could run laps.
The other wearing thing about travelling with babies is that everywhere you go at night, you pass lovely, inviting restaurants. "Inviting" not in the sense that the management or the clientele want you to come in. On the contrary, in the more inviting restaurants, you are about as welcome as a rat problem. Even when the other diners are not transmitting telepathic "go away!" messages, restaurants may be unsuitable for children because of fire hazards (or "candles" as you used to call them). So you find yourselves walking around cities, getting hungrier, and looking longingly into windows at how the other half lives.
When our children got a bit older, we went to France again. We travelled by ferry this time, a mode of transport ideal for babies, because they're not the only people throwing up. We took our own car, with a roof-box to accommodate the holiday luggage I once carried in a sports bag. En route to the campsite where we were booked for two weeks, we stopped in McDonald's, which offered the three things that a travelling child needs: a playground, chicken nuggets, and cheap toys for the car.
At our campsite, there were hundreds of families just like us. They seemed happy. Many returned every year. The campsite was surrounded by a wall, and had a 10pm curfew after which gates were locked. But there was no reason to go out at night anyway, because everything you needed was on site. During my first tour of the facilities, I marvelled at this new world that had opened up. Then I went off to inquire about joining the escape committee.