Status Anxiety

Wednesday, 27th August 2008

I feel like Jim Carrey in The Truman Show, but trapped in the Boden catalogue

I am currently in Cornwall where I am spending the last week of August with my family. I cannot claim to have been basking in sunshine — the weather here is no better than the rest of the country — but I am luxuriating in the warm glow that comes from being on an environmentally friendly holiday. As I make my way towards Fifteen, Jamie Oliver’s restaurant in Watergate Bay, I exchange approving nods with the other dads. I had no idea that saving the planet could produce such a powerful sense of wellbeing.

Admittedly, this feeling is quite hard to sustain once I have returned to the car park. I have borrowed a VW Caravelle for the week and while it is diesel-powered and does a respectable number of miles to the gallon, it is the size of a horsebox. I have two excuses for this. The first is that it is a thousand times more convenient than any other so-called people carrier. In addition to my wife, I have four children and a nanny and trying to shoehorn all of us into my Vauxhall Zafira, which laughably bills itself as a ‘seven-seater’, reminds me of that episode of The Record Breakers in which Roy Castle tried to squeeze several dozen people into a Mini. In America, I hired a Kia Sedona, but even that, which Hertz insisted on calling a ‘mini van’, was too small. Of all the people carriers I have driven, the Caravelle is the only one that can accommodate three adults and four children in comfort, with room for our luggage in the boot.

My second excuse is that offered by up by Colin Brazier in his recent article for Civitas about the social and economic benefits of large families. He dismissed the environmentalist case against over-population by pointing out that while large families use up more resources in total than smaller ones, their carbon footprint ‘per capita’ is actually lower. On that basis, my Caravelle should enjoy the same tax exemptions as a Toyota Prius.

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robert

August 28th, 2008 1:17pm Report this comment

Do they feature slap-heads in the Boden catalogue?

Steve Harper

August 28th, 2008 2:27pm Report this comment

A "plethora" of beautiful beaches? Wow!

Peter Rockhill

August 29th, 2008 12:07pm Report this comment

Toby, any human institution, like being Catholic, is capable of a limitless degree of hypocrisy. But please don't squander your talent on lazy journalistic shorthand like 'Catholic' for 'society's ills'- the Guardian have that cornered. We can all improve on our intrinsic hypocrisy, but in the meantime - as we say in the Church - there's always room for one more.

Anxiously stable

August 29th, 2008 12:39pm Report this comment

Presumably the air of wellbeing is enhanced by having the wife and nanny look after the brood while you peruse Jamie's latest offerings on the menu board. We'll be visiting the south coast of Cornwall next week and I'm terrified that my youngest, who's never happier than when he's toddling around with huge chunks of edible matter in either paw, will be picked on viciously by the voracious gulls that inhabit the shoreline down in that part of the world. We're driving to Cornwall for the first time, too. Still, the family's staying there for a week so I should have time to recover before the return journey.

Toby Young

August 30th, 2008 12:03am Report this comment

If you're driving, my advice is to do it in the middle of the night. On the way down, my wife picked me up at Heathrow at 10.30pm and we were in the cottage by 3pm. On the way back, we departed at 10.30am and weren't back home until 8pm.

anxiously stable

September 1st, 2008 9:53am Report this comment

Thanks for the driving tip Toby.
How did you get on with The Weakest Link by the way? I tried to watch a bit yesterday afternoon, but my attempts to switch over from CBBC was met with howls of disapproval from The Master of the House (and this after traipsing around with him for four hours at both the Science and Natural History museums.)