If April is the cruellest month, it must be because it contains the Easter holidays. At least, it seems that way if you have four young children, expecting to be entertained. I invited my ‘followers’ on Twitter to come up with some suggestions and they weren’t helpful.
‘Why don’t you lend your kids to Nike?’ said one. ‘They’ll get a free trip to Indonesia and learn how to make trainers at the same time.’
‘Stuff them full of chocolates and then eat them,’ said another.
In the end, it was Ludo, my four-year-old son, who came up with the winning idea: a trip to the airport on the Heathrow Express. Now, I know that doesn’t sound promising, but it had a number of things going for it. For one, Ludo loves all forms of transport and this combined planes, trains and automobiles. For another, you don’t have to pay for kids under five on trains, so the youngest three would go free. Finally, I was curious to see how empty it would be. Fewer people are taking holidays abroad, thanks to the credit crunch.
The outbound leg of the trip passed without incident, unless you count 22-month-old Freddie wetting himself. At my insistence, we have taken him out of nappies. This has nothing to do with the environment, obviously. Its sole purpose is so that I can lord it over other parents who have not started potty-training their toddlers yet. You’d be amazed by how much competitive satisfaction can be derived from pointing at a friend’s four-year-old and saying, ‘Still in nappies, is he?’
On arrival at Heathrow, we decided to go straight to T5. Neither my wife nor I had seen it yet and there’s supposed to be a Gordon Ramsay restaurant there. In fact, we could only find a Carluccio’s in the departures area — and that’s when things started to go wrong. We had to leave our two prams by the entrance, there being no room for them in the restaurant, and my wife’s overcoat was draped over one of them. An hour later, it was gone.
It had almost certainly been stolen, but we had to go through the motions just in case. That meant a trip to lost property in arrivals where we were told that in the unlikely event of it being handed in it would cost us £10 to retrieve it. Nice. I then volunteered to go back to Carluccio’s, just in case someone had picked it up by accident and had now returned it. Caroline said she would only wait in arrivals if I took one of the children with me, and I chose Freddie. That might not have been such a disastrous decision if I hadn’t been carrying him in my arms. My efforts to convince the manager of Carluccio’s that they were liable were somewhat undermined when pee started trickling out of Freddie’s trouser leg.
We were greeted with more bad news on the train journey home. I had originally asked for three return tickets — two adults and one child — and was pleasantly surprised when it had only come to £24.90. Even with a Family Railcard, that was a bargain. However, it turned out that I had only been given one-way tickets and the conductor insisted I buy another two. And, no, I couldn’t use my Railcard.
‘What if I refuse to pay?’
‘That’s your choice, Sir, but I will have to call the British Transport Police. No choice, I’m afraid. Rules are rules.’
So that was another £38. Once you factor in our lunch and the £10 parking fee, the grand total came to £120.75. And that’s not including the cost of the overcoat.
Sometimes I regret having so many children in so short a space of time, but then I remember a conversation I had with a biologist. He’d been puzzling over why it was that looking after small children made human beings so miserable. After all, from an evolutionary perspective, wouldn’t it make more sense if parenting made us happy? He had concluded that too much happiness left us weak and vulnerable. Experiencing parenting as a chore rather than a pleasure helped toughen us up. Other, less evolved humans may have enjoyed spending time with their children, but they had not fared so well on account of their general soppiness.
At the time I thought it was poppycock, but I now take great comfort from it. As Bertrand Russell said, ‘Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.’
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