There is nothing like a family holiday — and having recently returned from a week away with my wife and kids, I can confirm it was nothing like a holiday. But that’s not the impression anyone who follows me on Instagram and Twitter would have gathered: according to my social media posts I had the most amazing time. There we all are beaming under a blue Italian sky. In one post, my children are posing with souvenir swords bought from Pompeii and in another I shared an envy-inducing image of the view from my hotel on Ischia.
Is it any surprise that a recent study suggested nine in 10 social media users “feel sad” when they see their friends posting about travel? I suspect some of my followers would have felt a twinge of jealousy — which I guess was half the point of posting them in the first place.
But my social media feed told only a partial story. It’s not that I was trying to mislead, but when my son was screaming that he wouldn’t step inside Pompeii unless we bought him a wooden sword, I was too busy banging my head against an ancient Roman wall to get my camera phone out.
When my daughter starting shouting at her brother, I had my hands full trying to prevent them coming to blows to have the time to ask them to pose for a quick picture. And when my wife and I started bickering about something or other, it didn’t feel appropriate to pause the row to pose for a loved-up selfie.
Maybe it is time to inject some honesty into Instagram. I would love all family holiday photographs to come with a warning: “Caution: the individuals in this photograph may appear to be having a better time than they actually are.” By the time we arrived back home I was in need of another holiday — this time sans children.
My Easter excursion confirmed my theory that anyone claiming to have had a wonderful family holiday with their young children is either lying or stayed at a hotel with a babysitting service. You can have a relaxing holiday or you can go away with your children — you can’t have both. All the things that make life with children bearable at home — school, play dates — are not available abroad, so you end up spending 24 hours a day in each other’s pockets. That’s exhausting for everyone.
So why do I keep doing it despite everything? Partly it’s because I did not have the chance to go on holiday when I was young — unless you count a day trip to St Albans — so I want to give my children experiences I never got to have.
There will be a time when the memory of the meltdowns will have faded and I will look at photographs of the holiday, convince myself we had a great time and start planning another trip.
My experience of family holidays, in other words, is like how some women describe childbirth: it’s only when the memory of the pain subsides that you can contemplate doing it again.
In other news...
The number of homes with services such as Netflix, Amazon and Disney+ fell in the first quarter by 215,000, as households decided that, on balance, food and petrol were a touch more urgent than the second season of Bridgerton.
I am facing an even more severe dilemma because, alongside streaming channels I hardly watch, I also have subscriptions to The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books.
In theory this should make me hugely knowledgeable on a wide range of topics, but instead I have an ever-growing pile of magazines which lie unopened and unread. I keep imagining a future day when life is less busy and I might start tackling the magazine mountain, but knowing me, when that day comes the magazines will stand unread and I will sit slumped in front of Netflix’s Is It Cake?
