The summer holiday planner

Susie realises that the Easter holidays have only just started and her children are exhausted from relentless revision for their fingerpainting GSCEs (combined with multicultural mindfulness) but the summer holiday has to be done. Athena would like to go to Corfu so she can hang out in Kassiopi with all the school friends she sees every day at St Mary’s. “Here’s a fab villa, Mum, it would be so cool and Minty, Jinty and Kinty could bring sleeping bags and just sleep round the pool.” Mum is not in favour of this. She is going to rent a villa, not a campsite. Xerxes, crashed out on the kitchen table having box-setted throughout the night, mutters about gulets, Turkey and – to please his parents – Troy and Bodrum. Without mentioning that Bodrum has the world’s largest outdoor nightclub. Susie says wouldn’t it be fun, fun, fun to have a gorgeous villa in Tuscany and they could all go and look at the Renaissance art? This is greeted as with a reaction to smallpox. Susie enthuses about the joys of a pool – “Don’t be silly, Mum, that’s just the online visual, it’ll be the size of a duckpond. And do you remember when the Plonkers’ pool in Tuscany was invaded by adders?” Susie is squished. “So where do you all want to go?” Answers come there: Cornwall, Rock, Bembridge, Brancaster. Susie thinks “Why do I bother?” The best houses in Bembridge have gone and she may be too late for tickets for the Salamander Ball at the sailing club. She takes a 20mg Valium. “So, darlings, it is all going to be marvellous, I have found a huge house, you can have everyone to stay. It’s cool.” Her husband says: “The bloody house you’re sitting in right now has a swimming pool and a tennis court, but no one wants to stay in it.”