I was wrong about staycations

I hadn’t intended to go on a ‘staycation’ this summer. Quite the contrary, I’d booked a family holiday to Norway. Last August, I made the mistake of renting a villa in Majorca and it was so hot it was impossible to do anything, including sleep. So this year I insisted on going north and arranged to borrow a log cabin near Trondheim. The two oldest children were so unimpressed – they loved the nightlife in Majorca – that they refused to come, which was fine by me. The flights were £200 each way and it meant we only had to rent a Fiat Uno instead of a six-seater. One of the legacies of having been a journalist for 40 years is that I’ve done a lot of travel pieces and find it painful to pay for foreign trips out of my own pocket.

We’ve been go-karting, gone on a speedboat ride, walked to Walton-on-Thames

Then, 24 hours before our flight was due to depart, Caroline made a terrible discovery: Fred and Charlie’s passports had expired. We were tempted to go anyway, but the risk of leaving all four children behind is that they’d have a ‘Facebook’ party, i.e., advertise the fact that they’re having a party on social media and then be powerless to stop 1,000 teenagers streaming through the front door, laying waste to our home like locusts.

Indeed, Sasha has form in this respect, having organised a secret ‘rave’ at our house when she was 14, complete with DJs and bouncers. We were planning to leave her home alone, but found out about it just in time when a mother called wanting to know when to pick her daughter up ‘from the party’.