How do you stop children fighting on long car journeys? With three boys aged six and under, not to mention an eight-year-old tomboy, it’s getting to be a serious problem. Every journey seems to end in the vehicular equivalent of a cage fight, in which all four frantically try to undo their seatbelts so they can pile into the mêlée. No quarter asked, no quarter given. The fights are getting so vicious that instead of breaking them up I’m tempted to start filming them on my iPhone. A greatest-hits compilation on YouTube would get a million hits in less than 24 hours.
My initial solution was to get a bigger car. I reasoned that the more space I had, the easier it would be to separate them. So I went from a Skoda Octavia to a Vauxhall Zafira to a VW Caravelle — all in vain. What I needed, I decided, was an eight-seater so I could stick all four in separate corners. That meant trading in the Caravelle for a Transporter (more of a van than a car) but to no avail. I’m beginning to think that the only thing that might work is one of Boris’s new Routemasters.
On the way to lunch with a friend in Hampshire last Saturday I tried to distract them with a game. As regular readers of this column will know, I Spy has not proved a great success in the past, largely on account of Charlie not being able to spell and Freddie always saying the same thing, namely, ‘I Spy with my little eye something beginning with “chocolate”.’
So I plumped for Animal, Vegetable or Mineral instead — one of you thinks of something and the others have to guess what it is by asking questions that can only be answered ‘yes’ or ‘no’, apart from the first question which is always ‘Animal, vegetable or mineral?’ Eight-year-old Sasha got it straight away, but the rest of them had difficulty grasping one of the basic rules, which is that you have to be thinking of a specific thing that occupies a unique set of spatio-temporal co-ordinates.
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