Is it worth it? Do we genuinely enjoy going on holiday with our kids at this point, or do we just do it because it’s the done thing? Is it even possible to have enough fun to balance out the abject misery of a messy Stansted morning and solemnly explaining to your exhausted five-year-old that you might not be going on holiday anymore?
Travelling as a family is probably incredibly fun if you are absurdly wealthy, but for most of us, even if everything goes to plan, there’s a certain amount of gritting your teeth, sweating through your clothes, carrying upset children through transport hubs. Will they sleep on the plane to make up for the early morning? Absolutely not— they’ll be full ofIt’s also savagely expensive, even if you aren’t an idiot and do manage to get on your plane.
Everyone working in the airport was doing their best — even the security officer who binned my daughter’s toothpaste, and who I will hate until my dying day — but there simply weren’t enough of them. They were overwhelmed, stretched to the point of breaking. That’s what almost all of the chaos engulfing the UK comes down to at the moment: people expected to do too much work for not enough reward. It doesn’t work. We got there with two hours to spare, damn it.
We were not the only ones – there was a pretty substantial queue of flight-missers with us. The airline put us on the next flight and we made it, a mere 24 hours late, having had a few medium-sized arguments and spent several hundred pounds rebooking flights. Watching my daughter bob around in a not-that-warm swimming pool, chuckling to herself as she turns blue, I’m glad we didn’t give up. Being on holiday is a lot nicer than going on holiday, after all.
There’s a lot to be said for getting away from everyday life for a little bit, unclenching your jaw for a few days and trying your best to relax, drinking some sub-€1 beers and looking at some interesting trees.at the moment — in fact, it’s all far too much, and is likely to remain so for ages — and maybe it’s worth doing whatever we can to decompress and remind ourselves what life is supposed to be about, a message that all too often gets drowned out by the sheer overwhelmingness of everything.