Thank you for asking and yes, I did have a rather fabulous time at the seaside last week. I slathered my tentacles in Ambre Solaire’s factor cardigan, drank the vinegar that pooled at the bottom of my chip cones and managed to get sand so far up my conjugal crack that it is now acting as a contraceptive by silting up my uterus. In all, it was a joy. Except for one teeny, tiny thing: the car journeys in either direction while in the company of Kraken Junior. So in case you too are thinking of bundling your progeny into a car and driving them across the country, here’s why you should instead take a knife to your own throat:
The questions: don’t know about your spawn but mine starts asking whether we are there yet before we’ve even taken our pre-journey piss. It’s as if by packing a suitcase we’ve actually inverted the laws of physics, teleporting ourselves to our destination by the counting out of our week’s knicker supply alone. Worse, this comes after our obligatory The Talk where we explain to her that if she isn’t patient mummy will throw herself from the car in a hail of maps and Maltesers.
The music: until I birthed Kraken Junior my travel music of choice involved the words Pete Tong, Chase and Status and “Yes, occifer, I do realise that while I was doing the big fish, little-fish, cardboard-box routine my hands weren’t on the steering wheel”. Now, my travel music consists of a Disney film compilation and endless repeats of the dead-eyed Jesse bloody J while my ears employ my fingers as plungers. No wonder the Iraqis use music to torture dissenters. One warble from Snow White and I’d fucking well crumple like a traitorous zebra too.
The sickness: otherwise known as the bran-tub of chunder, because we never know what we’ll get or when it’ll strike. Kraken Junior’s ubiquitous “My belly hurts!” can be uttered either hours into a road trip or in a fleeting dash to a petrol station and can be cured with anything from a fistful of Haribo to her chucking so copiously that her produce actually splatters through the head rest in front of her, leaving a square of vomit on the back of my head. It’s a bit like It’s a Knockout except with gobbets of puke rather than watery sponges and far fewer perverts.
The games: I have no idea who created I Spy but I’d like to tie the fucker to the back bumper of my car and drag him over shards of frozen piss. Nothing makes me want to weep more uncontrollably than Kraken Junior pointing at a lorry, shouting “Something beginning with L!” and then proclaiming that the answer is “Cornflakes!”. And I could say the same for every other in-car game that doesn’t involve her having gin rubbed on her gums so that she sleeps for the rest of the journey.
The snacks: you know how, when you take sweets on a car journey, they are to stave off hunger/ break up the boredom/ bribe passengers into shutting the fuck up? Well when Kraken Junior is in the car it’s her opportunity to stare at the odometer and, after every mile travelled, demand a mashmallow. She’s like a unit of measurement parading as a small child on a starvation diet.
The boredom: exactly how entertained do kids expect to be when they are trapped in a Fiat Punto and hurtling towards the coast? In an effort to stop journeys with Kraken Junior feeling marginally less agonising than having our toes nibbled by trolls we have sung songs, invented stories, played spot-the-lorry and spaffed such statements as “No really! Thunder is the sound of Santa taking a shit!”. We even, once, strapped some viewing device to the back of my seat so that she could watch two solid hours of Peppa Pig which resulted in her vomiting so copiously that Daddy Pig had a Jimi Hendrix choking fit.
The predictability: I shit you not, there have been times when I have stood beside the suitcase-crammed car and opened a mental book on which one of the above fates will befall us first. It’s the only element of excitement I can muster, given that the next few hours will be a rotation of sweet-throwin’, game guessin’, music-warblin’ and vom-wipin’. If I didn’t need a holiday before the journey I as sure as shit need one by the time we arrive. So yes, in answer to your question, I did have a good holiday. Just don’t ask me about how in the fuck we got there.
This is why God invented the Nintendo DS!
Now, imagine you have four (yes, FOUR) junior travelling companions, who, in addition to generating all the above experiences in random order x4, make their own squabblesome entertainment. There, I bet you feel better already
(They all survived to adulthood. Not sure I did.)