Long way home....

Long way home.

I write this in peace on the Bretagne as we calmly plough our way back across “le manche”. Peace of course being secured by me and she who is now reading the indie booking an additional cabin and not telling the kids….

3 weeks of children and now we are hiding.

We arrived at Dinan a couple of days ago and true to our usual holiday form things took a turn. We don’t seem able to just go somewhere do something and go home, something always has to happen.

Sure enough; with us having committed ourselves to meeting friends in Portsmouth who are taking Taliesin off for another three weeks in Spain, something that required us to make a day crossing from St Malo which was best expedited by a stop the night before closer to the terminal (the alternative being a 5 am start) the weather broke, or rather shattered.

With a load of shopping to do we went and hid in the intermarche in Taden as the thunder crashed, lightening flashed the roof rumbled and shook, adding the odd buzz and click to the piped muzac…

There was a useful gap tween thunderstorm and tempest which was just enough to allow the tents to go up before we somehow got the kids to bed.

“I am really going to enjoy this” I thought.

I lay awake long into the night listening to the relentless barrage of water on tent.

Next morning, as if by a miracle the rain had gone. Unfortunately it had not washed away the neighbours.

By 6.30 they were fully awake, one had obviously over indulged the night before and young daughter, whose name I quickly learnt was Kayleeeeeeeeiggh was despatched to shout and rouse the long and presumably much suffering dad. I am not saying she was loud and strident but her second attempt was enough to set off car alarm somewhere else in the site. So was her fifth and about her ninth.

Then of course someone took the sensible course of removing the carpets from their tent hanging them over the line and beating them. Finally someone somewhere put up their camping chairs, not your run of the mill fold up types, these were held together with nails which took a lot of hammering in.

This was not the end of it, OH NO, later, with management a bit tired and in the tent on Siesta bent, someone decided the vaccum their caravan. The washing machine and spin dryer having finished mid morning and no, I am not making any of this up.

Holidays are a funny old thing, you see groups of people on the ferry going out, the prospect of two weeks together fueling a wave of excitement.

Fast forward a few weeks and you have a relationship in meltdown.

One of them will not have had enough sex. The other will be struggling with the realisation that they married a beast of limitless libido whose tortured and peverted taste for variations on the basic act would require the flexibility and stamina of an Olympic gymnast and make the Marquis de Sade look like Tufty.

On the boat, adult maturity (and mental exhaustion) will prevent them hitting each other with bar stools and bottles, but relations will aspire to cold.

The children of course will show no such inhibitions, and all around you the biblical Cain and Abel tale will unfold in real time.

Peace amongst the children will, so far, will only have been bought by expenditure that would bankrupt a third world state.

This in turn will generate mail from the likes of Visa and Mastercard that will cause yet more recrimination, statement shaking, finger waving and questions about whether it is really necessary to buy food.

By the time that is all dealt with someone will notice it is now Xmas and when that crisis is passed there will be the plop on the mat of glossy brochures showing happy families on the sand and another competitive school gate round of note comparing over who has booked two weeks in Benodet and who has decided to explore Bradford.

Now, I should add that this does not describe us. Management the kids and I have spent a really good few weeks away. That said, we are not home yet; Wait a minute, whose parents were they just calling for on the tannoy