Have kids, will travel (and try not to look after them)
The middle-class habit of abandoning children to kids’ clubs and holiday tutors is only the tip of the iceberg, says Rosie Millard
Last summer my daughter was offered an “ideal” holiday job by a woman she hardly knew. She was taking her family on holiday in a luxury villa on the Med. Come away with us for 10 days, she offered. Your job? To look after our three small kids. Not all day, just get them up, while hubby and I have a lie-in. Actually, maybe entertain them until lunch. Which you will serve them.
Oh, and babysit in the evenings while we go out, but that’s fine. The kids are all great sleepers. Did I mention my best friend? She’s coming too, with her hubby and their two sprogs. So, all in all, five children aged between two and 10. But they’re all great friends. That’s OK, isn’t it?
Yes, of course there’s a swimming pool. No, they can’t all swim. But they’ve got armbands. It’s a free holiday for you, isn’t it? Board and lodging. With the easyJet flight and £100 of pocket money thrown in. Bet you can’t believe your luck! My daughter was 17.
After I had picked myself off the floor, and given my sensible child a lecture on the awesome health and safety aspect of this bonkers plan (which she had already envisioned, mercifully), I thought about it. A family holiday, without the messy reality of actually looking after the, er, family. And without the expense of a fully fledged, full-time nanny. The groovy idea, in North London at least, seems to be that you hire a friendly teenager, who won’t answer back, to carry the awesome responsibility of looking after your children on holiday, pay them buttons and away you go.
Or if your kids are a bit older, why not opt for the latest holiday vogue which is to take a private tutor with you? This way, you’ll have a babysitter on tap and your dearest ones won’t fall behind in their A-level or GCSE revision or Common Entrance prep. So ferocious is the market for holiday tutors that British agencies now have pop-up offices in Tuscany, Switzerland and Dubai. The other middle-class favourite is to find a resort in which you can pack off, sorry, book everyone under 10 into a kids’ club. Kids’ clubs! What on earth did we do when these didn’t exist? No matter where you end up in Europe, the dreaded kids’ club will be there, with its wash-down tables and array of sullen carers with name badges, all supplying a never-ending programme of arts and crafts, singalongs and storytelling.
Admittedly, I, too, was once seduced by kids’ clubs until I realised that it was madness to work all year round in order to afford to go on holiday with my children only to parcel them off to other people who had zero investment in giving them a fulfilling time. Furthermore, most children simply hate them. They involve desks, screens and rooms and are far too much like school. What children want on holiday is to have some untrammelled down time with their parents who have finally put down their smartphones.
And not only do the middle classes have this curious habit of not wanting to spend time with our own children, we also have an intriguing knack of taking our mates along with us too, just so we can recreate our social circle at home while away.
You can easily spot the middleclass family on holiday – they’ll be in a joint villa in some remote village in Andalusia having dinner parties and getting drunk with exactly the same people that they have dinners and get drunk with all year round. Adventure? Escape? Meeting the locals? Not likely. What we like to do is create a sunnier version of what we have back home in Blighty. If we’re in a hotel, we’ll throw in our regular pilates and yoga classes too and, when camping, out will come the family size jar of Marmite and box of Carr’s Water Biscuits, just in case.
Of course, this has all been terrifically fertile ground for my new novel, The Brazilian, which takes a comic look at the British middle classes on holiday. For this, I came to the conclusion that there are basically only two times when we stray from our domestic brief.
Firstly, when it comes to our holiday wardrobe and we’re overcome by a sudden need to wear a too-short short, anything with pom poms on and try out weird hats and maybe even dabble in a bit of hair-braiding. The only other time a wild streak shows in the British bourgeoisie, is a sort of “what happens on holiday stays on holiday” attitude to relationships. Whatever age or stage we are.
The deeply conventional, married heroine of my novel longs to have a lesbian encounter, because a) she has never had one b) everyone else has and c) she’s away in Ibiza, having packed her little son off to the swimming pool in the care of a teenager.
What could possibly go wrong?