When a Holiday is Worse than No Holiday

Of course holiday nightmares are a staple diet of early evening television in the UK. My experience last week which ended prematurely by four days is not as bad as many you might see recounted on the television, I am not in hospital writing this nor have I been kidnapped; I did not have my car stolen or any family members taken or murdered, so I guess in the scale of things I have come off lightly. However, the experience was bad enough that I am thinking seriously of ever trying again. It was supposed to be a break, a rest, but I have come back feeling more weary, angry and frustrated than when I left.

As I may have outlined before the plan was to go and visit my brother who has lived in Belgium since the early 2000s. You can get to Belgium from southern England in a day by a range of means. It is a country with flat countryside, but nicely rural, and interesting historic towns, plus some great beaches. In addition if you tire of Belgium itself you can easily go into France, the Netherlands, Germany or Luxembourg. I am not a person to lie on the beach, I burn easily and when I last tried it in Crete in 1985 came away with blisters all over my body and then skin shedding in large chunks. However, I enjoy warm weather but get bored of simply lying around so like to get out and visit places and have some good meals. I know that does not appeal to everyone. Thus, I try to accommodate the desires of the people I am travelling with. Maybe it is the nature of being on holiday, maybe it is just me, but I now recall in the past people complaining, for example when I was on Lanzarote, that me coming back from a trip somewhere disrupted their relaxed time on the beach. That angered me, because a) I sat quietly on my return, b) they had had hours of being there while I was a way so my irritation of them was only a small percentage of their whole day. Yet, it is clear that even the concept of someone around them having or seeking a different kind of holiday is mentally upsetting to many holiday makers.

On that basis, I guess I should have been better prepared for what happened last week. I suppose we all idealise our holidays and never really foresee any difficulties certainly not with the others in our party. The party was of three: myself, a woman of the same age and her 6-year old child. Regular readers will recognise my current domestic set-up. The other two favoured going by train rather than the take-your-own-car-on-the-ferry usual option. Not having been on the new Eurostar service from St. Pancras Station in London (in contrast to the old route from Waterloo Station) I accepted this as something interesting to do. A couple of warnings, we were sat there waiting to be told to check-in and then found out they only announce a handfull of the check-in times, so we almost missed our window to check-in with only 4 minutes to spare. St. Pancras International resembles an airport (in terms of shops, security, etc.) except in one essential regard it lacks the television screens showing when check-in is. You have to give up your seat in order to find one as they are set at right-angles to where most people sit waiting. They need to install as many as in the average airport and have them in the cafes and toilets too. Having checked in I found that the Eurostar carriages are much more cramped than they were when I last used them in 2003. They are more like aeroplane seats.

Anyway, so we reached the home of my relatives in Belgium without too much difficulty. It was the following day that the problems started. It is clear that most UK children are now so addicted to their electrical items, that even the thought of a couple of days away from them or even just with a reduced service (two of the BBC channels (BBC1 and BBC2) can be picked up in Belgium, but none of the specific children's channels broadcasting in English) leads them to behave like a drug addict denied their heroin. Despite the efforts to supply said 6-year old with colouring books or dot-to-dot and even going out and buying more playstation games, failed to quell his discomfort and when a child is unhappy the whole party suffers. In some ways it was good that we were in Belgium and not on Crete as had been discussed as there there would have been no British TV or playstation for two weeks. Children in the 2000s are so used to having their imaginations stimulated by electronic media that they need them like a coma patient needs a drip and to even reduce this supply causes problems. I just could not cope with the whining and constant physical battering and spitting I faced as a result. I accept that I do not have the patience to be a father even a pseudo one, but it is certainly not enjoyable to be around a human being who clearly feels deprived, bored and hence depressed and particularly when you are trying to relax yourself. Consequently I became even more tetchy and irritable and began constantly complaining myself, adding to the spiral we were being swept up in.

Now, one solution would have been to go out and visit places to tire the child out. After all, he can still enjoy the beach even when the weather is not good. However, this ran into the second stumbling block. If the holiday had just been me plus the woman or me plus the child then it would have been soluble, but the triangle of all three with conflicting demands made it impossible. The woman complained that I simply wanted to drag everyone miles around the country seeing things. I do like to visit places but am willing to compromise. I had planned a trip to Brussels, one to Bruges and one to the beach over an eight-day holiday, no more. You can drive right across Belgium in an afternoon so nowhere is too far away. Well it is for this lady who wants entertainment on the doorstep. Motorways get you places quickly but she insists on back roads and then complains that the journeys take so long. I was prepared for this conflict thinking to have one day out, one day in, to hopefully keep the two happy. I was not prepared for the utter hysteria when we got in a hire car. This went to the extent of jabbing at the controls, screaming and crying as I was trying to drive. Apparently she had assumed that we could rent a right-hand drive car (as used in the UK) and was upset when we got a left-hand drive car (as used all over continental Europe). Not being a driver she did not realise how challenging it can be when you get in a new car even of the same model and even in your own country, let alone a strange hire car (I usually drive a Renault Scenic and this was a Skoda Spacer a very different class of vehicle and far newer than my car which is 10 years old). We had to abandon the car after ten minutes of driving. Mother and child returned home on the tram while I drove around the city; I returned the car the next day when it became clear that the woman was never going to get in it ever again. Anyway, staying 1 hour's ride from the station and being short on cash the other option of travelling around by train. So we sat in the house the following day and argued. Apparently I had not communicated the challenges of Belgium clearly enough or that everything was not available on the doorstep. There was a trip across the street to the MacDonalds and a Do-It-Yourself homeware store and that was it. It was clear no-one was enjoying themselves so I decided to come home.

One point of embarrassment was that of course our hosts blamed themselves for what had happened. For some reason the woman thinks she has nothing in common with them, but in fact has far more in common than I do with my family members: she smokes like them, likes gardening, interior design and cooking, even making bread, like them; enjoys reading graphic novels like them; has emigrated from one country to another like them and so on. So I had to apologise to my family members and try to get home. Eurostar is totally not flexible with its tickets. The return ticket had costs £238 (€309; US$480) for all three passengers when bought in January but to alter it to return earlier even though by now the Easter period was over would have cost €460 (£354; US$715). Eurostar did say we could drive to Brussels and plead that we had a good case to return and they would have reduced the alteration cost to €75 (£58; US$117). Of course I would have had to do this alone. Instead we were lucky to get a lift to Calais in France where I got foot passenger ferry tickets for €40 (£31; US$63). Of course for the woman the speed driven to get us to the ferry terminal in Calais and then from Dover back to our car (despite having to beat the rush hour delays which are terrible on a Friday on the M20 and M25) were unacceptable and she had to sit on the street swigging brandy, looking like a tramp, in order to compensate.

In between the two car journeys (and drivers in Belgium seem a lot more considerate than in the UK, when in the hire car, they were very tolerant of my stalls and wrong turns, not a single hoot at me) there was a horrible ferry trip with winds of Force 7. I vomited up everything to the extent that even three days later my stomach still feels like it has been punched. The weather meant unavoidable delays, but that could not be helped. As foot passengers on a ferry your luggage is handled the way it is on an aeroplane. It was treated with as much care and when it finally turned up on the carousel after 30 minutes, it was soaking wet from clearly being left in a yard and of course the woman's suitcase was missing meaning yet more waiting until they found. At least with a ferry the worst they can do is send it back to France and not Bahrain.

Anyway, it is all over now. A very expensive trip that achieved little. I briefly saw my family members and their new house, so that was good. However, I have come back more exhausted and even poorer than before with nothing bar some biscuits to show for it. Clearly woman and child cannot be taken on a trip together as their demands are so conflicting. The woman will have to content herself with holidays in the back garden and the boy will have to wait for school trips abroad (though Heaven help the teachers having to wean the pupils away from their mobiles and gameboys to look at whatever they are supposed to be seeing). Maybe with all our electronic connectivity in fact we are moving to being more physically insular and immobile. Given the rapidly rising costs of all forms of transport in the UK maybe this is what the government wants.

For me, this is the last time I try to holiday with anyone. I accept that I might be to blame in seeking to get out and see things. I am caught between two stools not being adventurous enough to want to hike in the Atlas Mountains or content enough to holiday in the back garden. I think what I desire is either an extended city break or to return to cycling in France, both types of holiday that I have done successfully in the past, alone. For now though it is back to work more stressed, more weary, earlier and poorer than before I tried to go on holiday and failed so dismally.

People Should Need a Licence to Have a Child

I have been reading today that schools are encountering ever greater problems with children who constantly throw tantrums because they cannot get what they want or are told they have to do something they are not keen on. This is very baby-like behaviour and by school age it is anticipated that children should have grown out of such approaches. Problems for the schools are exacerbated by parents treating their children like spoilt princes(-esses) and even getting violent with teachers if they dare criticise their darlings. Now we have a lot of things going on here that I have touched on before. One is the madly consumerist society that we live in the UK in which people equate happiness with the newest and most exciting consumption. This goes for adults as well as children, hence the massive debt so many Britons are in and children with more toys, clothes, food than they know what to do with and yet retaining a desire for yet more. The people who are parents of primary school now were predominantly born between 1968-88 so lived in a time of consumption but of less scale than now and certainly without the huge range of electrical items and all the tie-in products, twenty channels to watch and so on. All parents through history raise their own children the way they were raised, but in the past two decades society has advanced far more in terms of temptations and expectations than it ever did say 1948-68 or 1968-88. When I started school in 1972 we were still using books printed on rationed paper during the Second World War. Now children feel deprived if they lack an interactive whiteboard in their classroom.

The second thing is that in the UK there is a sense that one's business is no-one else's business even if it impinges on them. People get angry if you tell them to slow down when driving or to put their mobile phone away, or whatever. They believe in an ultimate right to do what they want to do without challenge even when it puts other people's lives at risk and certainly when it 'only' disrupts the learning of other children in the class. Of course not all the blame can be laid at parents. England in particular keeps examining its childern at age of 7, 11, 14, 16, 17, 18 and in common with the rest of the UK, since 1992 has had a very rigid curriculum. So, it is not surprising that children are bored and stressed by staggering from preparation for one exam to the next.

Now a few years back I saw a programme which tried to provoke debate and one week they suggested that children should be considered a luxury item and rather than parents being given child support and other benefits they should actually be taxed for the additional burden they were putting on the state in terms of healthcare and education costs. In the last decade the pattern of childbirth has shifted in this direction with birthrate falling among working class people as it does become too expensive to have children and rising among middle class people as they seek a justification (however weak) for driving a 4 x 4 and they started getting lots more maternity and paternity leave. Children still make up the majority of people living below the poverty line, but the large poor family is steadily dying out.

The key problem seems to be now, not so much whether people have the money or not to raise a child. Estimates for the cost are somewhere between £50,000-£130,000 (€66,500-€72,990; US$101,000- US$262,200) spent on raising a child from ages 0-18. You can add on £13,000 if they do a 3-year course at university and children. In addition the cost of housing means the average child will be living with their parents into their mid-30s even if they go away for some time for study, they will be unable to earn sufficient to live away for many years. So children are expensive. The key problem, though, is that the bulk of people who have children have no experience or training in how to look after them. If you want to work as a childminder or as a foster carer you have to undergo loads of scrutiny about your background, about your health and habits (such as whether you smoke or are obese). If you want to adopt a child you again have to be thoroughly scrutinised (they will look at if your marriage is going to last) and go through a probationary period with the child before they become yours. Yet if you create a child yourself no-one checks up on whether you are competent to raise them.

We know a lot now about raising children in the heavily consumerist society we find ourselves in. There are books and programmes all over the place to teach you how, just no compulsion. Is it any surprise that parents get it wrong and society pays the price of the screwed up, ill-disciplined children they raise. The UK has taken some steps in the right direction, for example, the famous case of Patricia Amos, jailed in 2002 for 60 days for permitting her daughter to go truant from school. Now, I know British prisons are full but once some more have been built we need to start increasing the number of incompetent parents who are punished. Of course by the time their children are teenagers it is really too late, which is why the state has to monitor things right from shortly after conception. Now, before people say that this is an intrusion into the privacy of the family home, who is it who has to pay for all the damage and crime that unruly children commit? Not the family, but the rest of us who have no control over how the child is brought up.

How my scheme would work is that the moment a woman realised she was pregnant she would have to register the conception with the local authorities and alongside any pre-natal classes she would have to begin to attend parenting classes. If there is a father on the scene he would have to attend to. If he did not then he would be barred from living in the same house as the child when it was born. Bad fathers are an even worse problem than bad mothers especially when it comes to raising thuggish boys. This is not a class issue, spoilt upper and middle class men charging around drunk in 4x4s on their mobile phones are just as remiss as a chav petty criminal, though of course neither would see what they were doing as wrong. This comes back to the huge malaise for the UK, people unwilling to live up to their responsibilities.

The parents passing the parenting course would be granted a licence and at the birth of their child would be permitted to take it home with them. Parents who fail the course or do not attend will have the child removed from them at birth and handed to foster carers. They would have 1 year to complete the course if they wanted their child back otherwise if they failed to do so in that time the child would go for adoption. There is a huge demand for babies to adopt and of course the adopting parents would have to go through the same tests that natural parents would have to.

Relationships break up and parents then meet up with other partners. If this happened then the prospective step-mother/father would also have to be tested and receive a licence before being allowed to live in the same house and their step-children. This would stop random adults who fancy a single parent being thrust into being a parent themselves, something they may be totally incapable of doing. In addition a lot of bad experiences for children come from step-parents, so far more monitoring is needed.

Right, once everyone is licenced and has received the basic training in how to be a parent, then at anyone time they can have their licence revoked and lose the child, if they behave in an inappropriate or neglectful way. This would ease up the removal of children for difficult situations. The destination of the child could be to properly licenced grandparents or other relatives or into adoption. In addition, equivalent to, say, HGV driving licences, at the stage which the child reaches 11, the parents have to undergo teenager training as this phase is far harder than raising a child up until then and most parents have no clue how to cope with teenagers. If the parents pass then they keep the child, otherwise it spends 1 year in care and if they have not passed the test by then, it goes for adoption. You could argue that if a parent passes for one child they can retain the licence for subsequent children reaching 11, but I would advocate if there was more than a 3-year gap they be re-tested as so much develops in terms of drugs and sex and consumption in such a short period now that people need to have their skills refreshed. Of course both parents would have to pass or be barred access to the child. Too many fathers are neglectful of teenage children, especially boys and need to have their attention focused on the continued need to work with them for the sake of the family and society. In addition if teenage boys and girls see the pressure that parenting puts them under they may be dissuaded from creating children in their teens too. Of course the state can set an age limit for the licence so meaning that any child born to a pre-sixteen child would be unlicenced and go immediately into state care. Children born to girls of that age have very little future and the mothers themselves are put in an impossible position.

When my grandfather learned to drive in the 1920s you simply wrote to an office in London and applied for a driving licence which they sent to you. Nowadays the driving test is more thorough than for the bulk of the 20th century with both theory and practical tests. It is less rigorous than those of our continental neighbours and this may be why we are plagued with so many poor drivers. No-one would argue that anyone should be permitted to be allowed to drive a car without having undergone a thorough test and passed it fully. In addition, for certain vehicles like heavy goods vehicles (HGV) they have to be retested at regular intervals. Why then do we permit people to have children who can cost even more to society and do as much if not more damage without having to undergo any testing or licencing?

Drop the Princess Obsession

While I can claim no credit as a child psychologist, I did train as a teacher in my youth and was a volunteer at a primary school in the 2000s (there were no male teachers and boys were seeing reading as something only girls and women did, so a number of men from my company were invited to come and read one lunchtime a week to show that men read) and now I sometimes take my housemate's son to primary school when it is raining, so I can claim some knowledge of schoolchildren. However, my posting today, though starting there spreads out into the adult world too. If you live in the UK you probably have noticed how pink everything is these days. When I was a boy, girls would sometimes wear pink, but also lots of other colours too, especially denim blue. These days they often turn out in pink shoes, dresses, tops, trousers and coats and quite often are dropped off by mothers driving pink cars (I must say shocking pink cars, a couple of which are in my neighbourhood and another passes me on the road each morning are slightly alarming). Okay, so pink is in. However, it is part of wider trend, one you can see emblazoned across the back windows of many cars not only these pink ones: 'little princess on board'. Some even have little tiaras fitted to their seats. The supermarkets are filled with stationery and lunch boxes and drinks holders all echoing this theme. I know parents are now afraid to let their children out of their sight and in the UK we are growing up with a generation who can do very little for themselves and are frightened of the real world, but this princess obsession goes further. By default it is saying that her parents are king and queen. I know people should be proud of themselves, but we also need to be grounded. There is nothing wrong with girls pretending to be princesses, but what we are seeing is overload. Why cannot she sometimes pretend to be an astronaut or a doctor or a warrior? The pricness overload also says to girls, that the only legitimate way for a woman to be is, as my housemate's son calls it 'a girly girl'. This is a very male chauvinist attitude towards women and is not a healthy one for boys to adopt. It is as if the whole feminist campaign going back to the 1900s and certainly since the 1970s has been overturned and the only role model for girls that is presented by the media and retail sectors and collaborated in by parents is as a pampered princess unable to act for herself, having her every whim fulfilled and only valued for her prettiness, no other attribute.

Now, you might say, it is just a phase and girls grow out of it. However, this is where the difficulties creep in. I have seen some of these 'little' princesses grow into women and yet their attitudes remain juvenile. They expected to get whatever they want just as they did when they were 5. They find it difficult to leave home and even when they do, the demand support, both financial and practical, from their families. They run up huge credit card bills and getting into vast debt is a common problem in the UK today. In 2006 over 90,000 people filed for personal bankruptcy and many more are in difficulty, partly because their parents never said 'no' or 'you have to wait until Christmas' or 'save up for it' or 'get a paper-round and earn the money for it'. Instead they say 'yes and do you want the rest of those in the series?' This pandering to every demand does not only have financial implications but physical ones too, 23% of UK women (and 25% of UK men) are now obese. Much of this is motivated by the consumer industry as women given this mindset make far better consumers than slim women who save and analyse what they really want rather than constantly being driven by fashions.

I remember clearly one example of a woman who grew out of all this princess merchandise into being a spoilt adult, sitting in her flat with her family buzzing around her as she commanded them to move items to her new flat. In the hours this took, she contributed absolutely nothing to the effort. Her parents were on hand to praise how skilful she was in selecting which commands to throw out. I had been brought in as a friend of her fiance's and someone with removals experience and I remember abandoning the task after about three hours when she complained that we had not hefted all the expensive furniture fast enough (despite the difficulty of very narrow doorways) and I remembered I was not being paid for this job and insults cost in my book. Having married my friend she decided she also wanted a lover to live in the house and imported him from South America. You might say that my friend should have left but as you know from these posts, getting a house, getting out a mortgage is very difficult in the UK so he is locked into a house with his separated wife and her lover who lives rent free while my friend pays the mortgage. This is where the princess obsession ends up. You might say 'good on her', but I would say she is not a strong woman, she is a parasite.

So before you go out and buy another item of pink clothing or a sign saying 'princess on board' for your daughter, niece or grand-daughter, think twice. Think about doing something that will enable her to be an independent, strong woman of the future who can handle money and know the true value of things both financially and in human terms. Start now and buy her some dungarees or a football or a book on amphibians. Ultimately she might turn her nose at not having her princess-side pandered to still more, but she will lead a better life as a consequence.