We are up in Leeds for the twice-yearly Novelty Sleeping Arrangement Olympics at my parents-in-law's house, which involves my wife and me drawing straws to decide which one of us will be kicked in the testicles all night by our three-year-old while the other spends the small hours slithering about on an inflatable vinyl mattress last utilised on It's a Knockout in 1971 to hinder the progress of leisure-industry professionals from Milton Keynes dressed as giant penguins trying to get from A to B carrying buckets of tartare sauce. Needless to say, the next day we are well fatigued, and it's not even as if we can catch up on our sleep what with the racket of the kids thrilling to the opportunity of going berserk in someone else's house and the steam hissing out of grandpa's ears, not to mention (though I might as well) my wife's mother, who has so entirely run out of walls to be driven up that by teatime she is reduced to tutting into a megaphone fashioned from The Daily Telegraph.
Next morning, we leave the older generation contentedly smoking their heads off in their matching orthopaedic recliners and drive off up the A61 to Knaresborough, which is world-famous for Mother Shipton, an old hag who was born in a cave and was almost burnt at the stake by Cardinal Wolsey for prophesying the dissolution of the monasteries and the Great Plague and for all I know the casual misuse of the apostrophe in pub menu's. Lucky for her, Wolsey was himself less generously endowed in the way of knowing what was going to happen next and indeed had barely had time to buy a packet of firelighters when he was captured by the King's men and charged with treason for making the Inland Revenue unpopular and being so useless at putting a good word in with the Pope for Henry VIII, who merely wanted to marry the new woman in his life before he had quite got round to remembering to kill the old one!
The eldest takes a sudden interest. 'So she's the one married to that doctor who murdered all those women?'
'No, no,' says my wife, 'Ship- ton not Ship- man. He was from Lancashire.'
Knaresborough is a beautiful place, though it does get slightly defiled on a warm day by people like us turning up, clogging the streets and eating all the ice cream and crisps. We park the car and take the bluebell path to the petrifying well, which has a washing line strung across it with hats and gloves and teddy bears that have been magically turned to stone by the running water, which has amazing powers. The children are entranced until the guide starts going into detail about aquifers and the position of calcium carbonate in the league table of interesting minerals. 'It's unique,' he adds, as though creating a lump of rock out of a handbag were some kind of marketable invention. I mean, maybe if they could do it the other way round
Still, very interesting, I'm sure. We go to the cave where Mother Shipton was born in 1488, and the children get to put their hands in the wishing well and give it their best for world peace (or possibly rare Pokémon cards) before being forced to climb the hill to the castle overlooking the craggy gorge and handsome Victorian viaduct and river dotted with people crashing into each other in boats. 'Hey, cool! Dad, can we go out on a boat?'
'Of course we can!' says my wife, who knows full well I would rather have my ears cut off than travel by water in the pursuance of nothing more urgent than amusement.
'What if we fall in?' wails the nine-year-old.
'Yes, what if we fall in?' I repeat. My wife gives me a much-needed poke in the ribs with her captain's telescope and 20 minutes later, we're going round in circles, her rowing, me at the back trying to steer with three children wedged between my legs, the eldest at the front loudly picking holes in my knowledge of left and right. At last, we're zigzagging up the river, and though I do seem to get more than my fair share of earache every time my wife gets her hair snagged in the branches of overhanging trees, or when the little ones suddenly decide to test Archimedes's principle of not leaping to one side of a boat to examine a floating leaf, I have to admit, at no time do we officially sink. Which is odd I don't remember making a wish.
Titanic videos to phil.hogan@observer.co.uk
