The greatest horror blockbuster this summer is not going to be played out in cinemas across the land. It is not going to star Neve Campbell and there won’t be a vampire in sight. There will be no PR puff, nor a peep of a fanfare. There will be no red carpet, no press junkets, no blast of flashes and certainly no spangly gowns. Instead, it is going to unfold quietly but surely in every bed and breakfast in the land, on every campsite and, if you’ve got a bob or four, in rented cottages or second homes. If you are really unlucky, it might take place in a foreign land. The name of this dread production is Family Holiday and you are its stars.
My name is Emma Kennedy. I am 44 and childless, and I could not be happier about that. There was a time, once, on a gray, dull Sunday afternoon when I glanced out the window and thought about having children but it turned out I was confusing the feeling of broodiness with terrible indigestion. Don’t get me wrong, I like children. I think they’re great. I write children’s books. I visit schools. Children seem to like me. I enjoy hanging out with them. I just don’t want to have any on a permanent basis.
Sometimes, friends with children stare at me with sad eyes and ask if I’m OK with being “the barren one.” I nod and assure them I’m fine, but quietly, without them knowing, I pat myself on the back for managing to look 10 years younger and for having what many would call a “life.”
Photo: Taipei Times
I am not going to beat around the bush. This has nothing to do with some magic anti-peptide cream I might be using. I don’t even possess a moisturizer. It is because I am childless. Everyone I know who has children looks shattered. Utterly broken. And it gets worse. Friends have children and that’s it. You never see them again. They disappear into a dark vortex where spare hours are a thing of the past. If you do manage to get them out, they have to go home at 9:30pm simply because they are spatchcocked with tiredness. All in all, it seems that having a family is terribly bad for your health.
But the main reason I don’t have children — and I’m going to whisper this so as not to startle anyone — is so I don’t have to take them on holiday.
The family holiday is, without question, something to strike fear into the heart of every man, woman and child. The very thought of it chills me to the bone. When people cheerfully tell me that they are “really looking forward to getting away with the kids,” I simply don’t believe them. I am looking at you, parents, and I think you are lying.
I put this to the test recently and decided to do some digging. “Do you really like going on family holidays?” I ask one pal, raising an eyebrow.
“Oh yes,” says my friend, nodding way too vigorously.
“What do you like about it?”
“Well,” says my friend, who then comes to an abrupt stop and stares up toward the ceiling.
(Five minutes of silence pass.)
“Oh!” she eventually resumes, “we don’t have to do the school run! Which is great.”
“And that’s it?” I persist. “The only thing you enjoy about taking your children on holiday is the fact that they don’t have to be taken anywhere first thing in the morning?”
“It’s great when they’ve gone to bed too,” battles on my friend.
Hmm.
I ask another friend. She stares at me, her left eye twitching. “I am taking my children on holiday in four days. We are going away for a week. I have now been planning this holiday for three months. I have been packing for a fortnight. I think when you’ve got to a point where you are planning your packing and then physically packing for longer than you are actually going away, your chore-to-enjoyment ratio might be out of whack. I have 15 suitcases. I can’t even fit them in the car. Two of my children get car sick and I’m not sure I even like the third. I haven’t looked my husband in the eye for five days. I’m going to come clean. This is not my definition of fun times. I don’t even want to go.”
At this point, she breaks down and I have to hold her as she sobs on my shoulder.
For balance I ask another friend, who, like me, has no children, if she feels any sense of loss or despair when she is on holiday without children.
“Oh, please fuck off,” she tells me. And then laughs openly in my face as if I am a lunatic.
“Have you ever been on holiday with other people and their children?” I ask, because I am like a dog with the bone for investigative journalism.
“Yes,” she nods. “I have. For 2 percent of the time I thought, ‘Oh, aren’t they wonderful.’”
“What about for the other 98 percent of the time?” I press.
“Thank God they’re not mine,” she replies.
OK, I think. This isn’t going well. I need to find someone who loves going on holiday with children. “I do!” shouts a chum. “I like nothing more.”
I stare at her suspiciously. “Hang on,” I say, holding up a finger. “Am I not correct in saying that when you go on holiday you have a) people whose job it is to entertain the children all day and b) other people whose job it is to clean up after them?”
My chum looks rumbled. “Yes. That is true.”
“Well that doesn’t count,” I say. “Go away.”
SELF-INFLICTED PUNISHMENT
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the results are in. I’m going to say it out loud. Taking children on holiday is like some sort of ghastly self-inflicted punishment. Why are you doing it to yourselves? You work hard all year round. Don’t you deserve a bit of piece and quiet? Don’t you deserve some fun? Children can’t even help with the driving. What is the point of them?
Going on holiday without children is brilliant. There. I’ve said it. Do your worst. And guess what? Everything you think you can only do with kids you can totally do without them. Day at a theme park? Leave them locked in the car. Want to go to the zoo? Tie them to a tree. Fancy a week in Italy in a villa with an eternity pool? Take them to a department store and lose them. “Oh, what’s that sound?” you ask, cupping your ear while lying on a sun-lounger sipping a cocktail at midday. No whining. No yelling. No puking. It’s the sound of bliss. I know it is an almost inconceivable concept to parents, but guess what? When you go on your own, you can do what you like. It’s almost as if it is a holiday or something.
What are you trying to do? Create wonderful childhood memories for your little ones to cherish for the rest of their lives? Well, sorry to put a dampener on that, but my childhood memories of family holidays have scarred me for life.
My bete noire, as has now been well established, is camping. It is national service for children. Every single thing you possess is damp. It is like having your entire body experimented on by independent, possibly alien, ecosystems. Go away for a “lovely” two-week break and before you know it, you have got something inexplicable and revolting, such as impetigo or trenchfoot, and the inside of your belly button has started to smell biblical. It is wrong.
Going abroad comes with its own roll call of miseries. The very first time I went to France, my mother was beside herself. She thought we had made it. She thought we were the bee’s knees. “We’re off to the south of France!” she tra la la-ed. It was the height of glamour. She wore a long skirt from Biba and some fancy clogs just to go on the ferry. We had a smorgasbord. There was smoked salmon. We couldn’t believe our eyes. And then, as we were disembarking, a girl in a pink velour tracksuit threw up down my leg.
KEEP MOVING
Since we were being shooed off the ferry by burly men in bright jackets, we didn’t have time to empty the entire contents of our trusty old Land Rover and put me into some clean clothes. Instead, we had to drive to a layby somewhere beyond Calais where I was taken, weeping, into a toilet block.
The lights weren’t working and there were no windows. It was pitch black and the tangy smell of sewage hung heavy in the air. “Put your arms out and feel around for a sink,” advised my mother. I was wearing flip-flops. I edged forward, waving my hands blindly into the dark. Then my left flip-flop hit an unexpected ledge and my right leg, falling victim to the universal laws of motion, surged forward and disappeared down a deep, sticky hole.
It was the toilet.
To recap. I had someone else’s sick on my left leg. And a whole host of other people’s excretions on my right.
My father, dismayed beyond belief and not knowing what to do for the best, simply put me into a bin bag, tied it round my neck and drove me, at speed, to a garage forecourt where I was blasted with an industrial hose. It was a bit like a scene from Silkwood.
That’s what I’m left with. These are my memories of the family holiday. Something appalling happened to me every time. On one holiday, when I was 13, I got the worst sunburn of my life. I was delirious and hallucinating. My mother, in an attempt to cool me down, placed me on a camp bed in a tiny patch of shade in front of our tent. A small crowd gathered to stare.
A heavy-set woman with a face like a bulldog came over. She was from the Netherlands. “I am a nurse,” she said, smiling. “Would you like me to look at your daughter?”
And, without even a handshake or a hello, the woman flipped me over on to my belly, pulled down my bikini bottoms and stuck a thermometer firmly up my lady’s excuse me.
I was 13.
Someone at the back of the crowd actually clapped. And then, she pulled the thermometer out, looked at it and said: “Yes. She’s hot.”
Thanks so very much. Do I blame that woman for destroying my life there and then? No. I blame my parents for taking me on holiday. You parents. You are destroying joy. “But it’s so lovely going away with them when they’re little!” you cry. “We can play games! And stuff!”
Yes. You can play games. We played Frustration, the most apt game imaginable. It promised “hours of family fun” but delivered years of simmering resentments. And don’t get me started on having to go on holiday with your parents once you have passed into the dark lands of the teenage years.
Guess what? Teenagers. They don’t even like you. Why do you make them go on holiday with you? Everything you do embarrasses them. Just let them take a tent to Cornwall, get drunk on cider and come home with a sexually transmitted disease. This is all they want. They don’t want to trail behind you at a National Trust property while you “ooh” and “ah” at the bougainvillea. They couldn’t give a toss. They want to snog someone they have just met for hours, sitting on benches or, even better, other people’s garden walls, occasionally coming up for air and eating chips. That’s it. That’s all they want.
I don’t understand why anyone takes children away. The Americans have got this sussed. They pack their children off to camp. This is the sort of forward thinking that has made them leaders of the modern world.
So here is a suggestion. There are loads of people waiting to adopt in this country. Why don’t we set up a service whereby you can hand your children over to people desperate to have a go and let them take your nippers on holiday instead? This is a win-win situation. You get the holiday of your lives, prospective adopters finally understand that maybe this children thing is more trouble than it’s worth and the children couldn’t care less. As long as they get a daily Mr Whippy and don’t fall into any toilets, they will be happy.
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