When I had three small children, a fellow columnist on this newspaper would joke that our holidays should be rebranded as “hellidays”, due to the stress involved being wholly disproportionate to the pleasure paid for.
They were actually halcyon days. What no one warned us of were the fraught vacationing choices lurking down the line when we reached the tense in-between times of the sixth form and student years. We grizzled parents want to spend time with nearly grown-up offspring, while the young have their own ideas of what sort of outing with the parents is acceptable. Add to this fissile mix the pent-up demand for escape after the pandemic, which has left us fantasising about family time and leaving the tensions of untidied bedrooms and arguments about messy fridges behind.
