When I was a kid, holidays mainly consisted of sitting in boiling cars outside Bangor needing a wee, shovelling pink sand and dead flies into hollow plastic shapes from deserted gift shops, scoffing soggy cheese sandwiches and singing songs about boys that we fancied in the tent opposite: “The boy in the tent opposite to us, he is a stupid prat, he wears brown flares and a chequered shirt, and a brown and yellow hat…” Negging at its finest.
I know time is wont to marinate memories in sickly sweet sentimentality, but I do look back warmly: even the times when a boy at Butlin’s kicked me up the bum, and my poor dad got bitten by a Rottweiler which roamed around the holiday resort (a local described the dog as “a bit of a character”), are viewed through rose, or at least jam, tinted glasses.
Now I’m a parent myself, I find our dual-income family in a different position from my parents’ back then, holiday-wise. These days there is a plethora of options to choose from. Once at their destination, people post their impossibly idyllic snaps online as instantly as they lose their room keys and start to bicker over the quickest route to the castle. And it’s expected by everyone – including you – that you want luxury wherever possible.
This summer, my boyfriend and I went with our toddler to a big family-oriented smart hotel in acres of woodland – the kind of place my parents would have sped past before setting up tents in a nearby boggy field, before craning over the fence to comment, “They’ve got granola? We’ve got a gas stove and a guitar, thank you kindly!” A swimming pool, tennis courts, a spa. I imagined mucky children with blackberries strewn in their unbrushed hair, hurtling amok through hedges, gobbling chicken legs. Instead, everyone behaved impeccably – including the adults.
There were beautiful, expensive looking items dotted about. The staff were ever-congenial, the restaurant perpetually serene and the other children smartly dressed, with straight partings (having forgotten any comb, I ended up doing our daughter’s with a biro).
The first evening as we sat down to eat, I was virtually praying aloud that we weren’t the family to break the tranquillity. Our daughter’s eyes darted from table to table, regarding puddings with a mixture of suspicion and envy which I knew could so easily spill over into ear-splitting chaos. When a toddler at a neighbouring table had a mini-tantrum over his sausages not being cut up small enough, I had never been so relieved to hear another kid kick off.
The relief was only temporary, however. We were in a pressure-cooker situation as our daughter started to squirm in her high chair, bored of having “Rock a Bye Baby” hissed at her. I ingurgitated my sea bass and lentil salad in approximately eight mouthfuls while standing over her highchair, trembling finger poised over Peppa Pig on my phone (how quickly “It’s a last resort” becomes “You’ve used up all your 3G!”)
I felt nervous and a bit wrong, like I do when I enter solicitors’ offices – or when I tried ecstasy in the 90s and had burning conversations about how everything was always going to be OK, as long as everyone possessed a whistle, never stopped dancing and never left this exact toilet cubicle – as if it was a perfectly respectable world I was dipping into, but one that didn’t quite fit. Sure, I was stealing the pens, but I’d never use them. I was playing a part, a hologram of myself.
On the last night, after our daughter gleefully squeezed an entire pouch of Ella’s Kitchen mango purée on to the satin curtains, it sank in that all we needed, as a family, was somewhere basic, even a bit broken. Somewhere with baked beans encrusted in unusual places, somewhere you can’t fill the kettle without someone screeching from the bathroom shower. I don’t know if it’s to do with upbringing. I think it’s to do with accepting the fact that you may not want to “dress for dinner”. You probably want to eat dinner off your dressing gown, grinning, by torchlight, with the rain pounding down all around you.
For information on Isy’s book and tour, go to isysuttie.com
