A perfect family day out at the end of a runway...
Mrs Canavan has had a terrific week. She’s spent the last six days in Paris, where she allegedly went to take part in a marathon (it happened on Sunday and she did it in four hours and 19 minutes, on the off-chance any fans of my wife’s running career are reading…), but appears to have spent the vast majority of her time away eating food and drinking.
She has an annoying habit of sending me pictures of what she’s up to, which I receive often while in a stressed state attempting to stop two small unruly children trashing the house.
Meanwhile I’ve had the children – currently in the midst of their school Easter holidays - on my own for six straight days.
The problem with my kids is they have so many things organised for them by Mrs Canavan – football, tennis, ballet, tap, theatre school – that they don’t know how to be bored. They need an activity, which is unfortunate given my preferred method of parenting is to say, ‘shall we see what’s on Netflix?’
It's been tricky to come up with ideas of how to keep them occupied, so much so that yesterday I found myself taking them to Manchester Airport’s Runway Visitor Park, billed on the website as ‘a supersonic day out’ on account of it having a Concorde on display.
It was something a bit different though and once you came to terms with the rather strong whiff of aeroplane fumes (because it’s situated right at the end of the runway) it was quite fun watching the planes zoom in and out.
My kids have never been on an aircraft (much to Mrs Canavan’s delight, my ideal family holiday is a week in a caravan in Anglesey or Northumberland or some other exotic destination) so they were quite impressed … although having said that there’s only so many times you can watch an Easyjet take off before you start to get a little passe about things. I tried to liven it up by throwing in fascinating facts, via Google, like, “hey kids, did you know a plane has to be travelling at more than 150mph before it can take off?” but after four or five of these nuggets, Mary said, ‘yeah whatever dad, can you give it a rest now’, a sentiment I couldn’t help but agree with.
I was pointing out all the different aircrafts, one of which was Ryanair. After seeing them take off and land a few times, Mary earnestly remarked, ‘that plane can’t be going very far because it keeps coming back so quickly after taking off ’.
I had to gently explain there wasn’t just one Ryanair plane but thousands of them. Ah, the innocence of children.
In truth, I’ve actually thoroughly enjoyed having the kids to myself. It’s been lovely to spend some proper time with them. That said, when Mrs Canavan returns later tonight, they’re all hers for a while.