Booking our summer holiday gives us that one moment of peace in our otherwise hectic lives. It doesn’t even matter where you go on holiday. Yes, we’d all like it to be a 5* retreat in Hawaii with a 24/7 kids club and an adult only pool, with personal waiters and on-tap cocktails, but honestly, a tent in Cornwall is often just as welcome. With statistics showing that more of us than ever will be opting for a ‘staycation’ this year there’s every chance that our holiday will be drenched in rain. It doesn’t matter. Lots of books, a good glass of wine, a roaring fire (and a great nanny) is just as much a holiday as bikinis, beaches and tan lines. Right?
Once your holiday is on the calendar you rest easy knowing that, no matter how bad things get, the summer holiday will make it all ok. You spend hours staring longingly at the week you’ve marked out as ‘HOLIDAY’ in your diary. You wish your life away hoping that every meeting and work day, every evening filled with kids and ironing and washing up will fly by. You would give a kidney if you could press the fast forward button to get to departure day more quickly. Instead, the powers that be make us work for our summer holiday. The stress involved in getting you and your family to the actual holiday means that by the time you get there, you’re not just tired and stressed on a normal level, you are so tired and stressed you can’t even remember your own name.
It starts about a week before departure day. You get your holiday clothes and your kids’ holiday clothes together and you wash them. You may even put them in a suitcase. It doesn’t matter. For reasons unknown to you, your kids will make sure those are the clothes they wear. It doesn’t matter how many times you tell them, they will wear them and you’ll have to rewash them...twice. It’s just a fact of life. Oh, and they’ll be bored of those clothes by the time they get there and they’ll officially ‘have nothing to wear.’
You assemble the passports and then forget where you’ve put them. When you find them you realise that your kids’ passports have expired. Nothing less than a last-minute trip to the passport office in London will solve this problem. Do you have time for this? No, of course not. You don’t even have time to book a wax, download a book on your kindle, or buy a new toothbrush mostly because you’re too busy washing clothes time and again.
Then come the travel arrangements. In your desire to book a value-for-money holiday you decided, in your infinite wisdom, to fly out of a London airport because the flight was cheaper. It doesn’t matter that you live two or more hours away. It made sense at the time. Now, you realise your flight is at 7am and all of a sudden, those two or more hours start to mean a hell of a lot. “It’s fine,” you think, “I’ll just book an early train.” Great idea, except that there isn’t a train early enough. You either need to book a hotel for the night before, pay for airport parking or sleep in the departure lounge. The cost of a hotel and the parking means that you save exactly nothing on your ‘cheaper’ flight and taking the kids to sleep on the floor of the airport is tantamount to sticking white-hot needles into your eyes so…you spend the money on a hotel.
Who cares? You don’t go on holiday to save money. You go on holiday to save your self and your soul. You cling on desperately to the optimism and decide that nothing is going to ruin this holiday. You laugh in the face of the early morning (aka middle of the night) get-up, even though your kids and your partner are in a mood as dark as the night you’re surrounded by. Despite the lack of sleep and the extortionate airport hotel bill (the kids found the chocolate and the soda in the mini-bar) you get to the check in area with a smile on your face and your whole family present and correct.
Check in goes OK. Sort of. You have to practically stand on your hands to stop yourself from slapping the silly grin off your husband’s face when he pretends he’s lost the passports. The kids start playing British bulldogs with the luggage trolley and it turns out – rather annoyingly – that your husband was right. You did pack too much stuff and you probably didn’t need that extra three pairs of shoes. Begrudgingly you pay the extortionate excess baggage payments while shooting a look at your smirking husband that says something along the lines of, “If you want to make it back from this holiday alive, don’t say a word.”
Next comes security. You’ve been smart. You’ve already put your liquid stuffs in plastic bags. Your kids haven’t and your husband hasn’t either but you’re still maintaining an unfailing sense of patience and optimism. Nothing is going to ruin your holiday mood. You’ve waited for it. You’ve worked long and hard for it. Even if you have to leave the rest of your family in a cell, you are going to enjoy this holiday. Then they take your very expensive eye cream. “But it’s in a plastic bag!” you declare desperately. “Yes madam, but it’s over 100ml. I’m afraid I’ll have to dispose of this.” You know they’re not going to dispose of it. You know that very expensive eye cream is going straight into their bag on a direct, non-stop trip to their bathroom cupboard. Damn them. But, who cares, right? You’re going on a fabulous sun-drenched holiday. Keep the eye cream!
It’s at this point that you may get a false sense of optimism. You’re on the home straight right? What can possibly go wrong? Well, let me tell you – a LOT can go wrong at this point. Don’t take your eyes off the kids. They’ll get lost, or arrested. Don’t let yourself, or your partner drink too much. You don’t want your kids to be the only one’s sober enough to get on the flight. Hold on tight to your boarding pass. They are slippery little suckers and very easily lost. Trust me. I know this. I also know that they don’t just reissue a boarding pass. They make you buy a new ticket. It doesn’t do much for harmonious family relations let me tell you.
You finally make it to the gate. You’re all on the plane. You may or may not have been delayed. At this point, it doesn’t matter. You’re so fried you could eat your own arm off with anxiety. You simply want to put your headphones on, crouch in the corner and rock backwards and forwards until it’s all over. It wouldn’t be so bad if you still didn’t have to negotiate the extortionate cost of the sandwiches and drinks that your kids will order on your budget airline, only to see them throw it all back up when they develop tandem air-sickness. You’ve still got to navigate a foreign transport system to get from the airport to your hotel; it was hard enough when you did it in your native language. You may be on the edge of a nervous breakdown and you may be wishing you’d booked a week at The Priory instead, but trust me, it will all fade away when you take that seat on your sun lounger, order a cocktail, open your book and relax.
That is, until your youngest slips on the side of the pool on the first morning and breaks his wrist.
