We have just had our first family holiday in five years. Nothing grand. A week in Scotland, fighting off midges and dodging the showers. We are lucky. Many people, in Britain and beyond, will be responding to austere times by staying at home this summer.
The ‘staycation’ – taking a vacation from work without leaving home – can be a tempting holiday option when you have small children. The thought of negotiating an airport departures hall with a two, four, six, eight, nine and 13-year-old in tow, is too awful to contemplate.
So we chose somewhere we could drive to. Even then, loading up the VW Transporter for a few days north of the border, represented quite an effort. We have what American generals during the Gulf War used to call a ‘long logistics train’.
It was a 10-hour-long journey to our destination in Argyllshire. My husband had vetoed the purchase of portable DVD-players. “Children are so over-stimulated,” he pronounced, “sometimes it’s good for them to get a little bit bored”. I was tempted to ask whether he was sticking with that philosophy when the children began what sounded like a mini-riot as we crossed into Cumbria on the M6.
But we made it in one piece, with no travel sickness. There was even a game of I-Spy as we drove beside Loch Lomond. Proof, perhaps, that mild adversity (well, boredom) can be the mother of invention.
Our home for the week was part of a house where an old work colleague, his wife and daughters, now live. A decade ago he quit his stressful London media job for a quieter life in his native Scotland, swapping a relatively modest home in the south-east of England for a rambling farm not far from Iona, where Saint Columba took early Christianity to the Picts.
Not everyone likes to holiday in what is, ostensibly, the home of another person. But we loved the chance to be somewhere different, using it as a base to explore some beautiful countryside and rocky beaches.
And, most of all, it was a bonding experience. Children do not always get our fullest attention as we wrestle with the laundry or spend our days shuttling one of them to and fro; a friend’s birthday party here and an after-school club there. But this week it was simply us and them, without the distractions provided by friends, neighbours, playdates, parental commutes or domestic tasks.
Perhaps, most of all it was a bonding experience for our children. For them, there was no getting away from one another. You cannot run-off to sulk in your bedroom when you are on a forced march through the heather. As my husband put it: “This is like home, just more so.”
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