10. We arrive at Heathrow on a Saturday morning. The kids plead for the Heathrow Express to Paddington. We point out that we are about to spend the equivalent of the GDP of a small Pacific island country over the next two days in London, and that we're not starting with 60 quid for the four of us to be on a train for fifteen minutes. We get on the Tube. Piccadilly line, direct to King's Cross. Straightforward enough. The train terminates after seven stops, the passengers are invited to get off. There are another two trainloads of passengers waiting on the platform. An empty train is brought along and eight million people cram on. We all stand stoically, pressed against each other. The train stops another few stations along the line. We are advised to seek alternative routes as there are signal problems at King's Cross, although we can elect to stay on the train and sit it out if we want. We, and many others, leg it up the stairs to the District & Circle. It's a weekend in the summer, so no Circle line at all. The District line train has just stopped, the passengers have been kicked off and told to go to the Piccadilly line. We trudge down the stairs, two kids, five bags, and go looking for the bus. Two of Two announces that he needs to pee. Not a toilet to be seen...
9. We're on the bus the fellow in the station told us to get on, although he'd said we would need to change. We ask the driver which bus we should get to King's Cross. He looks in the mirror, all chirpy and cheery, and says, 'Jump off here, darlin'..' - he was speaking to TPCKAM - 'the bus directly behind us will take you to King's Cross. We clamber off the bus, two kids, five bags, and clamber on to the next bus. 'Do you go to King's Cross?' says TPCKAM. 'Nowhere near it, luv,' says the driver, and fortunately, given how we're getting on, he doesn't venture any further suggestions. We extract everything we need from the bus, and summon up a plague of warts, frogs and boils on the previous driver, who had obviously just wanted us and our kids as far away as possible. A kind, saintly figure of a man points us in the right direction. As he's not wearing a uniform we take him at his word. The next bus driver is the kindest man on planet earth, and more or less drops us at the door of the hotel, even though he was supposed to be going to Penzance. It takes longer to get from Heathrow to King's Cross than from Warsaw to Heathrow.
8. The British Museum. We had hoped the kids would be interested as there was much that they had studied in the previous year at school. Naturally, however, they were bored. This is because the British Museum is free. They notice you not handing over vast quantities of money as you enter and you can see them looking at each other and saying, 'God, it's free. Like, how boring is this place going to be?' On the other hand, the following days' visit to the Star Wars exhibition - fifty pounds for a family ticket - was greeted with much greater enthusiasm.
7. A personal highlight. I had a couple of meetings in London on the Monday. TPCKAM took off with the kids and I was left alone. No kids, sitting in a pub at lunchtime, eating fish and chips, a pint of cider, and watching the test match on the tv. Life was created for moments like that. Makes you realise that there are higher forces at work. Even having to listen to an American explain the rules of cricket to another American didn't take the gloss off. 'And these guys, like, do this almost every day, and they don't even get paid $50m a year, it's like so weird. The red thing's called the ball.'
6. The next day we bought a new car. It has seven seats in case we decide to have three more children. Before we had moved out of the showcourt, the kids clambered into the back, Christening the rear bumper with marks which we know will still be present five years from now.
5. We saw three movies. Shrek 3, the Simpsons, Harry Potter. We're nothing if not sheep. There's no excuse for Shrek 3. The Simpsons is an hour and a half episode of the Simpsons. Who knew? HP was great. The kids keep saying, 'There's a storm coming 'Arry.'
Well, Two of Two has said it once, but I thought it was funny and I think I'll encourage him to say it more often. Although if he starts saying it every time he sees me getting in a bad mood, then he'll more than likely get a clip round the ear. I should point out, that that would be a virtual clip round the ear, as obviously actual clips round the ears of your children are likely to turn them into pot-smoking, delinquent, school-skipping, dysfunctional teenage young Conservatives.
4. For years now, TPCKAM has been advocating camping as a lifestyle choice. I have countered this by advocating staying in luxury five-star hotels as a lifestyle choice. Finally, the force of nature won the day and I reluctantly acquiesced. The tent was bought, along with all the other camping paraphernalia, for an intended three day camping binge as we drove back across Europe. How we all sang in anticipation!
In our trial run, we erected the tent in the back garden, on a slope, in just under forty-five minutes, which seemed something of a triumph. That night TPCKAM slept in the garden with the kids. On the slope. The next night, with the kids still keen and their mother adamant about her non-participation in a second consecutive night of slope-sleeping camping hell, I was brought off the substitutes bench and corralled into action.
Unlike most nights which have say, eight hours between ten in the evening and six in the morning, this night had somewhere in the region of three hundred hours. The kids slept, I lay awake on a back garden which suddenly seemed to resemble the north face of Kangchenjunga. Outside people spoke on mobile phones in strange languages, cats fought, seagulls swooped and dived, their mournful ululations increasing in desperate melanchollic intensity as they realised they were nowhere near the sea, and beneath it all there was a strange, reverberating hum, presumably coming from the giant underground generator which powers the planet.
3. We arrived in Belgium a couple of days later. Got lost, drove through a variety of strange little towns in the Ardennes, then finally pitched up at our pre-booked campsite at around seven in the evening. It was a beautiful summer's day, a few insects buzzing, a lazy warmth in the air. Perfect camping weather. The campsite wasn't the most elegant, in fact it was pretty horrible, but we found a large patch of flat grass, we had the tent up in seconds, and within an hour the kids were paddling in the river and TPCKAM was sitting by her stove cooking beef stew while we sipped a fruity French white, with hints of melon, papaya and frog. Idyllic. We ate dinner, we brushed our teeth in a communal moment of good humour, and trooped into bed, happier than the Von Trapps after a quick dash across the Alps into Switzerland.
At four o'clock the following morning, the wee man clambered out of his sleeping bag to do the necessary. Upon his return, he claimed that his sleeping bag was wet around the rim. It was indeed wet around the rim. There was absolutely no explanation for why it should be wet around the rim. This is a fundamental truth about camping. Things get wet for no reason. Another fundamental truth about camping is that things frequently get wet entirely with reason. It started raining at 4.40am. Summer shower, I thought as I lay snuggled up in my mummy bag. Drifted back off to sleep. Was awoken at around six by the most fantastic crack of thunder, directly overhead. Massive, massive thunderstorm. Biblical rains, loud noises, bright flashes. Are tents safe in a thunderstorm? Well, you're lying on the ground, which is a bad start. I said to the wee man, 'stay away from the side of the tent.' He's young enough that he just did it rather than look at me like I'm a total sad sack, before making a run for the car. Keep away from the side of the tent.... that's the kind of thing you find yourself saying when you're a parent.
2. We packed up in the rain, we headed for Germany. It rained ALL DAY. At some point we abandoned the idea of camping a second night - actually for me it had been three weeks earlier when I had first acknowledged the fact that it was going to happen at all - stopped in Hannover and booked into an international chain hotel. We asked the receptionist where we could go and get dinner, this being a smallish international chain hotel without a restaurant. She pointed us in the direction of an Italian she liked two and a half blocks away, through the torrential rain. We had nearly died in our tent, and then driven for eight hours in treacherous weather with Audis and BMWs overtaking at 250kph, and while every articulated lorry in Europe drove slowly towards the Ukraine in the inside lane. We didn't want to walk two and a half blocks in a Noah-esque downpour to get something to eat. We walked fifty yards and found a Pizza Hut and realised that the receptionist was a woman without children.
1. We sat in Pizza Hut, relieved and relaxed, aware that there was still another eight hours of driving the following day. Pizza and large glasses of alcohol. The kids had a little play area, everyone was happy. It came time to leave. We said to the wee fella, 'Put on your shoes.' We said this several times. He lifted his shoes from under the table, but then dropped them to the side of the table before the putting on the shoes instruction had properly filtered in. 'Put your shoes on,' we said, another few hundred times. It wasn't like he was doing something else, but kids don't need to actually be doing something else to not do what it is they're being asked to.
The whole sequence would have made a slow motion scene in a Scorsese movie, with grand operatic music and balletic movements from all involved. The shoes lay on the floor. The wee man hurrumphed and stalled and prevaricated. The waitress walked amongst the tables carrying a tray with five pints of Coke and lemonade. We nagged the wee man. He stalled further. The waitress stood on the shoes. She stumbled, she fell forwards. The drinks flew through the air and crashed onto the carpet, ice and Coke and broken glass everywhere. This, in fact, was where it stopped being like a Scorsese movie, because in the movie one of the glasses would have been impaled in the head of a New York gang leader, and in the Pizza Hut in Hannover, the glasses just fell unexcitingly on the floor. The waitress looked embarrassed, we looked even more embarrassed, the wee man found the time to put his shoes on. In the end it was more Sofia Coppola than Scorsese. I was even making up the bit about the broken glass.
The holiday was over, we had survived the camping, we survived the drive from the German border to Warsaw, and we had survived Hannover Pizza Hut. Or, more to the point, it had survived us. And now, only three more weeks and one more trip to the UK to go, and school will once more open up its gates to the triumphant cries of the herald of angels.
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