A family holiday? Give me a break
Take Jack’s tips for happy trips
IT’S been some time since most of us had a multi-generational family holiday.
But before we start planning next year’s dream family break, comedian Jack Whitehall has a thing or two to say.
In his new book, How to Survive Family Holidays, the star – along with parents Michael, a producer, and actress Hilary – has shared some dos and don’ts.
Jack, 33, and dad Michael, 81, have been sharing their travel adventures with the hit Netflix show Travels with my Father for the past five years.
Part memoir of family life, part travel guide, the Whitehalls’ words of wisdom might make you think again before making that big family booking.
PREPARATION
The first piece of advice I would give you when preparing for a family holiday is this: it is of paramount importance to have a period of exile from your family in the lead-up to a holiday.
The more extended this period can be, the better it will serve you. It will act as a much-needed palate cleanser from your nearest and dearest’s foibles and follies.
An emotional sorbet, if you will. A little circuit breaker, which could last anywhere between six and eight months. Enough time to forget everything about them that annoys you. Maybe even a year. “Having it out” may sound like a dreadful experience, but in the Whitehall household it’s become such a regular feature of family life that we look forward to it, rather like Christmas. And by the way, it does also happen at Christmas.
This doesn’t mean these issues won’t be brought up again, repeatedly, on the holiday. The wounds will, of course, be reopened on numerous occasions, picked over forensically and discussed at length at every mealtime.
But by having gone several rounds with them already, you know their points of attack, how to parry the jabs. Hopefully, you will also have ascertained their points of weakness and developed tactics to shut down and kill the discussion in its tracks. Although you might think that friends could be important allies on a family holiday, never, ever take one with you. Oh my, no!
You think this will be a good solution to the problem – a companion to retreat to when your family gets too much – but there is no greater test of a friendship.
I would love to see one friendship that survived it. Exposing a friend to the dark underbelly of your family and their inner
Before travelling with family it is important to have a period apart.. maybe a year
JACK WHITEHALL COMIC’S TONGUE-INCHEEK TIP FROM HIS NEW BOOK
workings is a sure-fire way to unpick any bond you may have had.
In my experience, a friend encountering your family dynamics is exactly like them seeing you naked. At best, they’re going to pity you. At worst, they’re going to tell other people about the scale of what they’ve witnessed.
THE AIRPORT
Hell hath no fury like a father whose child has lost its passport, especially when this overwhelmingly important fact does not come to light until they are standing at the BA check-in desk.
I have never felt a fear like the fear I experienced having to tell my father that I couldn’t find my passport at the airport on the return leg of one trip.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen him react like that, with the possible exception of the first time he heard a woman speak on Test Match Special. I’ve never seen a man angrier. I’ve also never seen a man backtrack less elegantly when, retrieving some more of this country’s “Monopoly money” to pay for the “mucked-about-with lunch” in the “ghastly” airport cafe, the offending passport was discovered to have been in his briefcase all along.
Another element of any airport departure guaranteed to hijack you timewise is the dreaded security. Actual jihadis probably feel less nervous in the queue for the X-ray machine than someone travelling with Michael Whitehall. Always try to give older relatives a little refresher on the protocols before you arrive.
It baffles me that no matter how many times they go through security, they behave like it’s alien to them. It’s pretty much the same at the supermarket with a self-service checkout. They will feel the need to act like they’ve just been roused from a 20-year coma.
“Didn’t have to go through all this nonsense when I was your age,” says my father every time we go through the same procedures he has now been doing for over two decades.
“That was before terrorism existed, Daddy. The most likely thing to bring down a plane when you were my age was a Messerschmitt.”
“You know whose fault this is? That bloody shoe bomber!” he will bellow at the top of his voice.
“Don’t say shoe bomber in an airport, please,” I hiss, as a security man eyes my father’s gouty toe as though it’s a suspect package.
“If it hadn’t been for that bloody shoe bomber, we could keep our shoes on; but no, we have to go through this farce every time we fly.”
“Stop saying shoe bomber, for God’s sake!” By this point everyone else in the queue is staring at us. Some of them are taking photographs. “So now my freedom of speech is being taken away, along with my brogues..”
“The only thing being taken away will be anything they find after a full bodycavity search if you keep saying ‘shoe bomber’ in an airport.”
“DO I LOOK LIKE A TERRORIST?” Another thing not to say in an airport.
LOST IN TRANSLATION
I struggled with languages at school. I was bottom of my French class – or, as the French say, “le bottom”. Pretty sure that’s right. It wasn’t until I got into my more self-aware teenage years and went abroad that I noticed how excruciating it was to see my father addressing a Frenchman in French.
Talking very loudly and slowly in broken English, as though the man was underwater; gesticulating wildly with his hands, as if he were not so much asking for directions to the Carrefour as playing charades.
The hammer blow would land when the person he was talking to replied in perfect English. There could be no greater incentive to learn a language. Maybe that’s why they do it?
I ended up with an A (as the French call it, ‘un A’ – amazing how it never leaves you) at GCSE French and I put this down to having had to sit through these shocking exchanges, wishing the ground would swallow me up or the gods would strike my dad dumb.
“Daddy, you should at least try to make an effort with the language; we are in France,” I’d say to him naively. At least making an effort shows a little respect for their culture. Of course, what I failed to realise was that showing a little respect for French culture was the furthest thing from his mind.
“Garcon,” he would holler at the grown man waiting on us – the one looking as though he was picturing my father being politely shown not to his table but to the guillotine. “Bring – me – my – bill. Merci.” You realise why our two nations have fought quite so many wars. One of my mother’s more dramatic incorrect French phrases has gone down in family folklore.
It was uttered by her in Provence on the occasion she accidently ran over my then baby brother with the hire car. She hadn’t noticed that Barnaby had decided her backing the car out of the ridiculously small garage was an opportune moment for him to have a wander around the rear of the vehicle.
A thud, a squeal, an emergency dash to hospital, and we were treated to a wonderful display of my mother’s loose yet confident grip of the French language. “Mon beìbeì est mort,” she screamed as she burst through the casualty-department doors with a now-giggling Barney in her arms.
He clearly wasn’t ‘mort’ and luckily was pretty undamaged. As, to her relief, was the Espace, avoiding the need for any further uncomfortable explanations to the hire car company.
“I’m sorry about that dent; I tried to park it on my toddler’s head. Does that mean mon deposit est mort too?”
Jack Whitehall, Michael Whitehall and Hilary Whitehall, 2021, extracted from How to Survive Family Holidays to be published by Sphere, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group on October
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