Holidaying

Holidays change everything.  Routines are out of the window.  Cosy little rituals which you have developed with your child for months are out of the question.  The comfort of knowing where everything is and needs to be out back is just rendered totally out of the realms of possibility.  OK, maybe the last one is a little over the top, but I had to make it fit with the others.  Things definitely get harder when you’re on holiday, even just down to the fact that the rooms are laid out differently so you now can’t creep past the child’s bedroom door to get to your own room without the child immediately being aware of you and its eyes, like piercing lasers, suddenly locking onto you while you have the sinking feeling of knowing that the supremely tired child is not going to go back to sleep for another hour. 

Holidays make things difficult, which is why you will always see a slight glint of terror in a parent’s eyes as they finish loading the car and set off.  We have just been on holiday for the week on the beautiful Pembrokeshire coast and it has been absolutely brilliant, I’ll tell you all about is sometime as well as utilising the blog to act as an international slideshow of my holiday photos.  Surely what Tim Berners-Lee intended when he sat down to invent the internet, you can imagine the conversation can’t you?

“So how was the holiday boss?”

“Brilliant, I’ve got 600 photographs, of which only 7 will be of any interest to anyone else, now I just need an efficient way of putting all 600 in front of the eyes of as many people as possible”

“How about a dinner party?”

“It’s not big enough, I need something that people can access in the comfort of their own homes, preferably using an existing feature already in their homes, like the cooker or the telephone, and that will, in 40 years or so, be so ubiquitous that the entire world will be able to know how big the breakfast was of the couple who sat at the next table to me.”

Perhaps it wasn’t quite like that, but I imagine it was close.

The holiday was wonderful, but I will admit that I had that terror-glint in my eye as we set out for four hours of driving.  The first hour and a half or so were fine, N was fast asleep.  But then the traffic jam came and the child woke up.  I’m not going to describe in detail then next couple of hours.  For one the description of almost constant moaning and crying would probably get a little tedious, like the constant repetition of names in an Arthurian epic.  And for another I’m told that the first step to recovery after a traumatic experience is to learn not to relieve but to remember.  I’m not quite there yet.  But just let me say that you may have heard that something will always be far more gruesome if you leave it to the imagination.  Well I wish I had been imagining that journey rather than living it.

But it ended, and ushered in a week of sand, sea, occasional sun and a lot of fun.  Remind me to tell you about it sometime.