8308/21227
Kids are an equal mixture of delight on holiday as you can imagine. They are mainly the source of many laughs. Just today Ernie said "I don't like omelette or strangled eggs" which gave us a good five minutes of riffing as a family as we imagined how you'd strangle an egg. He also said to his mum, who had moved in his sleep because he is snoring, "When you turned me over last night it made my dream go upside down and I fell into the sky." Which is one of the greatest sentences I've ever heard.
On the other hand both kids started singing
the Macaroni song today (if you want to keep your brain free of irritation then do not watch this) and then didn't stop singing it until bedtime. No matter how many times I told them to shut up.
So it's a mixed bag. They might provide me with one piece of stand up material a year, but I have to put up with an awful lot of self-indulgent rubbish to get there. So in many ways it's like working with Stewart Lee.
It was a good last full day though. We went for buffet dinner for the first time and all the families with kids were put in one room, with an open door to a nice bit of lawn with grass as thick as a luxurious carpet. After dinner Ernie went out there to try and cartwheel and do head stands and sing about macaroni, but gradually nearly every kid in the restaurant joined in the fun and they played a big game of tag.
I discussed with Catie how, with my childhood holidays, as long as we stayed mainly on the campsite or wherever we were that we had full rein to go anywhere and play with anyone. Your parents trusted you not to do anything too stupid and trusted that French paedos would respect the sanctity of our holidays too much to do anything unpleasant. One time I was playing with a kid whose family asked if I wanted to go canoeing with them. I assumed it was just a quick jaunt on the river so didn't tell my parents and we ended up going out for about two hours (and I had no idea what I was doing and successfully capsized the boat on a small waterfall as they shouted at me to put my oar in or take it out). When I got back my parents had noticed my absence and had been somewhat concerned (and fair enough, I might have killed myself and a Dutch or French family). But otherwise there was an incredibly lackadaisical approach to child care.
Nowadays parents keep their kids close and whilst my holidays were full of making friends (and as I reached my teens eventually kissing a couple of girls), my kids are hardly ever free to do their own thing. They did make some friends at kids club, but didn't really play with them outside of that. Until tonight. And it was terrific to see them all running wild and having fun.
Eventually the other kids went to their rooms, so I went to play with my two and Phoebe asked to play "What's the time Mr Wolf?" which we haven't done for a good few years. I almost forgot how to play, but when it came to running away I set off at such a lick, after days of no exercise, and I almost lost balance. If I had fallen I am pretty sure I'd have broken my leg which would have been the perfect end to the holiday.
It's a shame that we are so scared of predators that kids don't get the freedom to roam that we had in the 70s and 80s. I was only approached by one paedophile in all that time when at the bottom of Cheddar Gorge a man asked me and Phil Fry if we'd like to come and meet some puppies that he had. For some reason they were in another location. We had been told enough not to go anywhere with strangers and both saw through his not entirely watertight ruse. And look there's a chance he was just a nice man who wanted to introduce puppies to children.
Weirdly we didn't immediately tell another adult about this guy, though I did tell my parents when I got home. And they might have let someone in authority know (or maybe not) but they didn't stop us going up the gorge on our own.
I am still too scared of dangers to let the kids out of my sight for too long. Like with so many things we're been made to see the danger in everything and get a completely ridiculous assessment of potential risks.
I am even more astonished that my sometimes over-protective parents let me hitchhike round the UK and Europe on my own in the 1980s when I was an incredibly naive and immature 18 year old virgin. There were a few weird and slightly scary rides (and a man in a car in Marseille seemed keen to help me lose my virginity by kindly offering to give me a blow job, by pointing at my penis and then at his mouth), but if there were millions of people out to kidnap or kill young people then they wouldn't have had to put in much effort to get their next victim. And that was at a time with no computers or DNA databases or even any real cooperation between police forces.
We need to get better at balancing risk and reward. And less scared of imaginary fears being stoked up by people with agendas. Still I doubt anything like that is happening back home. Can't wait to get back to the welcoming UK.
