Five go mad in Devon

It was my birthday recently, not one of the big numbers like 40, 50, or 60. Not even one of the ones that has a comment attached to it like 29 “It’s all downhill from here (male) your biological clock is ticking (female)”, or 39, “Ohh 40 next year, nearly time for a crisis.” I am a plain boring old 38. See you can’t even think of a single comment, funny or otherwise to make, it is a truly dull age to be.

My darling Wife, perhaps sensing the impending mood of prevalent doom, decided to surprise me with a weekend away to my spiritual Zanadu in Devon. I had spent the previous night with a couple of old friends having a near-middle-aged-indoors-because-I-have-to-babysit-drink-up, and was feeling slightly the worse for wear when I received this news. I showed as much enthusiasm as my, now boringly aged, body would let me, cancelled my plans of getting drunk in the garden, and started to make a mental check list of required luggage. Favourite pants in case I got lucky, favourite book in case I didn’t.

My booze addled brain then started to wonder who was having the kids during this weekend getaway. In my head various suspects were proposed and ignored. My brother-too busy, my sister-never changed a nappy, Oma-moving on swiftly, my parents-already in Devon, brother in law-too single, sister in law-too organised. I just could not figure out who was having the kids.

All of a sudden a thought, so terrifying it caused a sumo-like retraction in my nether regions, occurred to me. There was only one couple I knew, that would be stupid enough to look after the kids for the weekend, and in the next sentence my Wife confirmed it. “The children are so looking forward to going to the beach.”

So off we went one big happy family on a 200 mile, 5 hour car trip to insanity, via the A303. In fairness to the kids, they were not that bad on the outbound trip, not that good, but not that bad. I had read somewhere that the word “posh” was an acronym derived from an old term they used on the cruise liners, “Port Outbound, Starboard Home”. On that basis, there was “Plentifully Angry Infant Noise” from the “Getting In The Sea”, and our vehicle was “Flippin Useless Car Knows Every Diversion”.

We eventually reached our destination at 10.45pm. The kids had stayed awake for the whole journey, only to fall asleep at 10.15pm, just in time for us to wake them up to take them to the hotel room. You could tell the Receptionist was impressed, by the way her perma-pencilled eyebrow arched. I don’t know what her problem was, she was hardly likely to be staying in the room below us. The people who walked in behind us got that particular room. They were the ones with every right to be worried. Although on the basis that he seemed to be fifty with a few quid, and she was 25, orange and was wearing a belt for a skirt, it looked like they might be keeping us up.

Upon entering our “Family Room”, I got my next birthday surprise. I had imagined a double bed with room for a cot at the bottom, and an adjoining room with a couple of single beds for the other two. What I was actually faced with was one room with a double bed, and a pull out sofa bed. Joy of joys, any idea of any naughtiness or relaxation, was now completely out of the window.

We unpacked and settled everyone into their beds. Luckily for me, my Wife had had the foresight to bring a travel-bottle of Jack Daniels for me, to go with the bottle of Coke purchased from the service station. I drank it “alcoholic private eye style”, straight from a coffee cup. All that was missing was some Pepto Bismol and a gun, and I could have been Phillip Marlowe. So there we were, my own little “Partridge Family”, except as we were in a Travelodge it was more like an “Alan Partridge Family”.

It was quite unsettling to realise how alike me and the kids are, judging by the amount of giggles going on each time one of us broke wind, anyway. The only one not amused was the wife, in fact she was starting to remind me of the boss cowboy in Blazing Saddles, “I think you’ve had enough beans, boys!”, except he didn’t have a moustache and an attitude.

The rest of the night went a lot more smoothly than expected, and the usual morning chaos that is feeding and cleaning, also went well. “Strength in Adversity” will now become our new family motto, which is good because our previous motto “Why does it always happen to us”, lacks a certain punch.

We met up with my parents, Aunt Joan, Cousin Jon and wife, and Cousin Neil and family. 11am was too early to start drinking, so we headed on down to the beach. Budleigh Salterton has a beautiful beach, made up entirely of smooth round stones. Sand always sounds like more fun, but as sand ends up everywhere, and I have an aversion to wearing sandpaper pants, this type of beach suits me just fine. Plus it gave me and my cousins another chance to play our infamous “Throw like a girl” game. Rules are fairly simple, pick up a stone in your wrong hand, take a run-up, throw it as far as you can, fall on the floor crying with laughter as you are mocked for how stupid you look. If you don’t believe me try it, it is singularly the funniest thing you can do for free.

It is amazing how much fun doing nothing is. The rest of the weekend was full of walking, drinking, eating, oh, and buying a load of herb plants from the village hall. Village life rocks, in the can you turn the radio down a bit, type of way. Before we knew it, it was time for the journey home.

Mate actually fell asleep an hour into the journey, which is unheard of. Katy chose that moment to start getting loud and whingey, and would only be quietened down by a sweet. The obvious noise reconvened as soon as said sweet was finished, and after various telling’s off, the cunning little madam offered this piece of advice, “I can’t talk when I am eating sweeties, so more sweeties would make me quiet”. How can you argue with logic like that? Sweets were duly dished out every 10 minutes or so, until I spied Mate starting to wake up. “Daddy, can I have another quiet sweetie please?” “That’s OK darling, your brother is awake now, so the quiet sweets can go away.” Advantage Daddy, huh, take that little girl, I win you lose. Except now the sugar rush had kicked in, so we were forced to listen to the Ting Ting CD (her favourite), to channel all her excess noise.

The only other thing of note to occur that weekend happened near Stonehenge. There is a huge natural pig farm almost opposite the site, so whilst I was trying to direct everyone’s gaze to, in my humble opinion, one of the most amazing monuments England has to offer, Katy had spotted something far more interesting. “Daddy what is the birdie doing?” I looked over to where she was pointing, only to see something that had never been covered by any David Attenborough documentary I had ever watched. Standing on the back of one of the pigs, was a huge crow, pecking God knows what, out of the pigs butt. All I was certain of though, was that it was not going to find the cure for Swine flu there, and that there was no way was Mrs Crow going to give him a welcome home kiss tonight.

I have always felt that Easter holidays are the mock exams to the summer holidays GCSE’s. That therefore, must make Bank holiday trips the last minute revision on how not to relax.

A letter from America

Dear Dawn, Katy, and Mate,

I have no real reason for writing you this letter. As of this moment, I am not ill, or expecting to be. I stopped smoking over 2 years ago, so whilst I appreciate, it could come back and bite me on the arse further on down the line, all is well on that front. As you probably know, I do like a beer or three, but even the amount of booze I consume has halved since we sold the pub. I am slightly over-weight, but you can blame that on the non-smoking, as I now have my taste buds back. I am sure you would agree that everything I cook tastes so gorgeous, so what’s a boy to do? That’s right, eat some more.

So my health in general is OK. Your mum can stress me out a bit, but we all suffer that one together, and her bark is more often worse than her bite. The only thing that gives me cause to pause is my memory. I think this is an affliction most of our generation are going to suffer with, and I blame the music industry. Your Granddad has always marvelled at how many song lyrics I can recite at the drop of a hat, he almost seems proud of me for it, but I am beginning to think it may have a downside.

I think the part of my brain that is used to store all the thousands of lyrics I have heard, is full up, and needs a new “storage solution”, as big yellow box would put it. Unfortunately, the bit of my brain devoted to tiny inconsequential stories about you lot, now has some lyrics mixed up with it. I could, if asked, sing the whole “Purple Rain” album, word for word, including that freaky backwards bit at the end of “Darling Nikki”, but ask me what Dawn’s favourite first book was, and all that springs to mind is “Revolver”, which is obviously not correct.

I can remember Katy’s first word (other than Mum and Dad of course) because it was PUB, and even in writing that, I still feel a perverse sense of pride. Ask me Dawn’s fist word, and all that springs to mind is “Confidence is a preference for the habitual voyeur of what is known as...” Now Dawn has always been an A grade student, but that can’t be right.

In my head, Katy’s first nursery was in Stanley Road, Dawn was born in a hospital in Baker Street, and Mate’s playgroup is on Warwick Avenue. I have looked all of these addresses up, and they are all wrong, so I have decided to write this letter, as some sort of ‘kick in the nads’ to my memory banks, and also something to embarrass you all with, if you are ever brave enough to bring home significant others.

I remember taking Dawn to Camber Sands when she was about 5, if you have never been, it is a long flat sandy beach, which can stretch for at least 200 metres when the tide is out. Dawn had brought her favourite teddy bear, Mr Wendal, along for the trip, and as soon as we parked the car and opened the door, she was off. They looked like a modern day Hansel and Gretel running towards the sea, but instead of a trail of breadcrumbs, we had to follow a trail of discarded clothes, straight to the sea. When the trail eventually ended, we were faced with a naked child, and a very soggy teddy, splashing about for all their worth.

For you Katy, I remember, that at the time we were thinking of having you, it was very fashionable to name your child after the place they were conceived. Even President Beckham and First Lady Victoria, named their child Brooklyn, a famous, if not seedy, part of New York where they were staying at the time. Your Mum and I were at a wedding, in a beautiful part of Cornwall, on the (drunken) night of your conception. We thought long and hard about it, but “Hotel Corridor” is not a name you should inflict on any child, even if that child then conspired to deprive you of sleep for 2 years.

That then leads us to Mate, always destined to be the baby of the family. Actually, you remaining the baby of the group had little to do with destiny, and lots to do with the operation I had to make sure it stayed that way. You see, your Mum comes from Irish Catholic stock, and that lot have kids into their sixties, and I don’t mean their age. With you, it is more about forgetting the things you have done, than remembering. You are the Steve McQueen of the family, always trying to escape. We had the zoo incident, the Tescos incident, and as a one year old, you actually broke out of your cot by bouncing. I kid you not, you jumped so hard and so often, you went straight through it. I wouldn’t mind, but it was not one of those cheap IKEA ones, it was a real wooden one from your rich Aunt, on your Mums side.

Such fun and such memories, all disappearing purely because some brain-box, working for a grocer, invented the IPod. If only I knew then, as I uploaded the 600+ CD’s in my collection, the end result would be a loss of your childhood exploits, then maybe I would have just listened to them the old fashioned way, one at a time. Although, if I download The Beatles Anthology, maybe I will forget about all the nappies I have had to change at 2 o’clock in the morning. Where’s the USB lead?