I often feel as if, with all the time I spend away from my family, my life revolves around planning holidays with them. Little islands in the hideous swirling maelstrom of tides of fortune that my working life feels like. Our whole family unit is built on the hope of adventure, of some vague idea that we are people who go to places and do things, even though over the years of raising small children, a successful trip to a garden centre was an achievement. “Successful” was nobody eating the plants or getting lost in the scented candles. I still remember frantically combing the toy section of Frost’s in search of my three year old, thinking up ever more exotic disaster scenarios involving the tiny Koi carp pond, and finding him in the Yankee Candles section, carefully picking up and sniffing each one.
My desire to plan holidays also extended to writing a 5 year plan to check off the days until our youngest child was 4, and we would be able to go on a climbing trip to Kalymnos without the kids. The idea was to count off the minimum time until they were old enough to be left with grandma for a week – this idea was hatched at her encouragement. I had just found out we were expecting our third bundle of joy, and we were all sitting on the terrace of a cafe on holiday in Zakynthos. So when we got home, I did indeed map out the days in Excel, and it printed out a grid of over four pages. Occasionally, I would have a bad day, and go and cross off however many days I had forgotten. Its last day was 31st October 2022; I found it the other day. We never did go.
Perhaps that was the moment I realised that the baton has passed from us fulfilling our dreams, to us fulfilling our children’s’ dreams, which right now are the perfect holiday. There have been so many holidays where I got to see the pure joy of being alive, written on their faces.
Every era has different things that matter to children. So taking them back to the holidays that brought me that joy seemed risky. As teenagers. we went camping with our mother in France every year. Our father did not camp. Moulin de Malesse was a campsite in Correze , which is the French equivalent of Somerset, or maybe Shropshire. It is next to a lake, with a stables attached. The facilities are somewhat rustic, with three lukewarm shower stalls and the usual french toilet situation. You pitched tents where you liked, and jumped in the peaty lake, which I was intimidated by – the name of the mill (“molasses”) referred to the colour of the water. It was run by a friendly lady with three sons. She offered simple meals in the beautiful old stone cottage above the watermill in the evenings, and during the day, two of her sons looked after the riding school.
It was a big risk taking the children there, 30 years after I had last been. Would it even still exist? What might have changed? Would they remember us? I wasn’t sure if I was more worried about it being the same, or whether I was worried that it would illustrate how old I was.
We went, and it somehow did all of those things. We arrived at midnight, in a crashing thunderstorm. This was not really the best start to a camping holiday. Thierry was one of the three brothers, and it transpired that he had taken over running the place. He came and tapped on the window, a country Frenchman who looks oddly similar to Keith Flint. He has the same sort of edgy energy.
He offered to put us up in the wooden teepee he had built under some trees. It was covered in a yellow tarp and secured with a steel door contraption, so it was a little…Blair Witch; but we were grateful, but it was dry, and we rolled out the sleeping bags and went straight to sleep.
The next day, we set up our camp by the edge of the lake. The whole area is such an untouched paradise that the ground was covered in beautiful little baby toads who seemed to have just crawled up from a small inlet. At night, we found that a little collection of different toads took up residence under our bags. It felt quite mysterious, and I found them beautiful. I can see why so many myths arise about them. They look at you as if they know you. I promise I wasn’t smoking anything.
We toasted marshmallows by the fire. The kids jumped into the peaty lake with great abandon and marvelled at the bats skimming over the water at dusk. We made crepes. We had random dinners of cheese and bread. We had big arguments about the kids not going to sleep, which I still feel sad about. Whenever you read this, kids, I’m really sorry. I messed that up, and I can only apologise.
Then we did another week in the French Alps, but I should stop posting photos of the kids online, and the whole thing is best illustrated with photos. They went on a lot of mountain biking trips, and hikes to huts, and to the pool, and had chips (yes, we are so middle class that “having chips” is a separate, noteworthy activity).
Anyway, that’s it really. Recreating family holidays works, most of the time. Just still working on being a better person. Also, Salers is so pretty.
The resting writer 
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