Four days in and I couldn’t possibly describe this holiday as a success. The weather has been apocalyptic. We’ve been sidetracked by all manner of non-holiday crises that insist on lunging in at us from the peripheries. And, worst of all, my wife has decided that we should move to Margate permanently.
Given that a functioning mobile signal here is the stuff of myth, and the entire town is dominated by a tower block so cartoonishly bleak that it is almost definitely where Damian Lewis was tortured during the third series of Homeland, this isn’t exactly a thrilling turn of events.
Plus, it turns out that a holiday with a baby isn’t actually a holiday. Not really. You can’t just spontaneously pop out with a baby. It’s difficult to convince a baby that staying in bed until 8am is a fun and worthwhile thing to do. Babies, I’ve discovered, are spectacularly unjazzed by the prospect of modern art. So, no. A holiday with a baby isn’t a holiday at all. It’s just an excuse to be exhausted in a different place.
Yet none of that really matters. Against all odds, I’m having a brilliant time, and it’s all down to the baby. Until now, I’ve tended to be an obnoxious tourist, preemptively scraping through TripAdvisor and Lonely Planet for lists of things I need to see, do, buy and eat before I die, then hauling everyone on endless all-day, shoe-destroying, box-ticking death marches so I can kid myself I’ve “done” that place properly.
Now, I don’t want to do anything. Not a single thing. The less I do here, the happier I am. To be honest, there’s a little bit of necessity involved in this – bitter experience has taught us that it’s possible for babies to actually have too much fun, and if we packed each day with adventure, his seven-month-old brain would overload and we’d end up saddled with a holiday companion who spends his whole time screaming hysterically at my wife’s nipples.
But this is what I want, too. For the first time since he was born, the three of us have had a chance to hop off the hamster wheel and take stock of where we are, and how completely our son has become part of the family. This holiday feels like the first comma in the story of his life, and we’re taking every opportunity to soak that up. And, as lovely as Margate is, it can’t hold a candle to something like that. This week we could be anywhere. We could be in Spain or India, or a burning shed on the side of a ditch, and the priority would still be spending as much time with my wife and son as possible.
Having a baby has meant that excitement has taken a back seat. We’ve scaled back and made do. But by scaling back, the little things – the things we’ve tended to blast through obliviously at full speed in normal life because we have been so laden with commitments – have become the most important.
There’s an apple tree in the garden here. When I look back at this holiday, it won’t be the beach I remember, or the weather, or anything like that. It will be getting up before anyone else, and sitting underneath the tree with my son eating apples together. Honestly, I couldn’t give that a high enough TripAdvisor review.
