Reality bites

There were four of us last week in the caravan near the beach in north Cornwall for our annual family holiday: me, my boy, my boy’s grandma and my boy’s little half-sister, Amy, aged ten. We were very excited to be bringing Amy this year. Her Mum has agoraphobia and hasn’t been out of the house since Amy was born, and Amy’s father labours six days a week and rests on the seventh, so Amy never really gets to go anywhere.

But this year — hallelujah! — because Amy’s grandma was going down to the caravan with us, her mother agreed that Amy could come as well. Ten years old and the first time she’d been away from home for more than a day.

From the moment permission was granted, my mind had been filled with joyful fantasies of dear Amy being an outdoor girl for a whole week. In my mind’s eye, she had the sun on her face, the wind in her hair and she was pedalling furiously around the safe-ish roads of the caravan park; or on her knees making sandcastles on the beach; or carefully dipping her net in rock pools when the tide was out.  Corny old Hollywood feel-good film fantasies, admittedly, but that’s how my mind works and there’s nothing I can do about it.

On the journey down we crossed the Tamar bridge, which, I informed Amy, is the boundary between Cornwall and England. Then I ran through some of Cornwall’s idiosyncratic laws, such as the one making it an arrestable offence to be seen in public without an ice-cream or ice-lolly in your hand. And the one stating that parents and guardians aren’t allowed to send their children to bed until after midnight. (Cornish