Hols Hath No Fury - Saturday July 10, 1999

Now we're officially into the British monsoon season, it's time to think about holidays. My mind instantly wanders to CentreParks, that maniacally-welcoming breeze-block eco-system - the entertainment diaphragm where "the weather can't spoil your holiday". The slogan is catchy enough, but the ad-demons have not done their research properly. The fundamental flaw in their sales pitch is that it's not the weather that spoils your holiday - it's the members of your family who persist in coming with you.

As a child, we never really went on holidays abroad. In fact, "abroad" was spoken of so rarely that I believed it to be a place akin to that in The Wizard of Oz: dark, thorny and presided over by flying monkeys. That abiding image still informs many of my opinions on Europe.

The Perkins family specialised in day trips, exacted with military precision. Imagine a kidnap, give it a holiday twist, and you're there. At 4am, Dad would rip the duvet off me, throw me over his shoulder with a chuckle and bundle myself, my brother and sister into the back of the Austin Allegro.

Brighton from Croydon is no more than 50 miles, and yet at 4am we'd be bombing down the A23. What obstacles was Dad expecting? Road blocks? Typhoons? A volcano? No acts of God would befall us on the trip.

At 4.50 am we'd arrive in darkness, park outside a coffee shop and bicker for three hours until it opened. At 8am, we'd stuff ourselves with tea and doughnuts, which we "enjoyed"' on the damp pebbles of the beach in a 40-mile-an-hour cross wind. By 10am, Dad would be bored. He'd want to get back to the telly. By midday, we'd be back home, confused and caffeinated, wondering what on Earth had just happened.

I can't wait to have kids.

 
I mourn the loss of the GB family holiday - these days it's all CentreParks and Disneyland. I'm talking rain-slashed, 70s Britain with really unflattering swimwear and pot-holed, Little Chefless roads.

Our annual destination was the Lake District, to annoy our grandmother for three weeks. These were pre-M6 days, so Dad always left plenty of time for the journey. One year, we left Leatherhead at 2:30am. We were all on the pavement at 2am to witness the key ritual of the holiday: Dad packing the car. There was something almost mystical about this event, as he took up position at the back of the Vauxhall Viva, like Andre Previn in front of an orchestra of suitcases. Woe betide anyone who broke his concentration, and double-woe if you actually moved forward to place your own bag inside. He would mentally size up all luggage items and, with his engineer's brain, work out the most efficient bootspace/luggage ratio.

Even more serious visual geometry is required to see how four strapping kids managed to jam into the back of a Viva. As the youngest, I was always shunted forward over siblings' knees. We were a boisterous bunch with a penchant for doing endless impressions and very weak gags (some things never change) and once we'd been on the road for four hours, Dad's patience would be tissue-thin. He'd start to move his neck like a tortoise inside his mustard rollneck sweater, then he'd try to control the noise by indiscriminately swiping out his hand in the vague direction of the back seat. Due to my vulnerable position I invariably caught most of the hand flack and would wail solidly. Dad stopped the car -there was always a hard shoulder to cry on.