The Family Holiday: A Field Report

We went to Cornwall for a week in August. I have significant things to say about this.

I want to first establish what we believed the holiday would be. We believed it would be a holiday. A week away, change of scenery, the sea, the children would love the beach, Claire and I would have some version of the rest that both of us were accumulating significant debt of. This was the model.

The model was inaccurate in instructive ways.

What the holiday actually was

The holiday was our normal life, operated from a different location with worse kitchen equipment.

The children were the same children. They had the same needs at the same times. Sam woke at 6:45am with his plan, regardless of the fact that the plan was now being enacted in a cottage in Cornwall rather than a suburban semi in the Home Counties. Ellie had opinions about the beach that were contingent on variables I could not control, primarily temperature and the presence of interesting shells within reasonable walking distance of the windbreak.

The meals needed preparing. The sun cream needed applying, which remains one of the most friction-intensive processes in family life, a process that involves coating a child who is actively resistant to being coated in a substance that is cold, sticky, and takes time to apply when the thing they want to be doing is already happening twenty metres away.

The bedtime routine was the bedtime routine. In a cottage with thinner walls, louder.

The things that were genuinely different

The beach. This I want to acknowledge properly, because my model was not entirely wrong — the children on the beach were a version of themselves that was different from the everyday version.

Sam on the beach is a child who has discovered an entire category of experience he did not previously know existed. Water that is cold and moves and responds to being jumped in. Sand that is everywhere and gets into everything and yet manages to remain interesting. Shells of various shapes that he has decided have individual personalities. He was, on the beach, operating at the peak of his current capacity for wonder, which is a real and observable thing.

Ellie on the beach is a child who has decided that the sea is an engineering problem, specifically around the construction of sufficient barriers to prevent waves reaching her moat. She worked on this problem for approximately three hours one afternoon with the focus she brings to things she has decided matter. It was, from a metre away and without the sun cream friction, a pleasure to watch.

Claire and I sat, adjacent to the engineering project and the wonder-at-shells, and looked at the sea. We had several conversations that were not logistics. This is the correct metric for a holiday success and it was met.

What I would tell myself before going

Travel light on what you expect the holiday to be. It is not rest, not in the way that a holiday before children was rest. What it is is the same life in a different setting, and the different setting does the work. Not the dramatic work of transformation — the gentle work of removing the accretion of familiar context and letting you see the ordinary things in a different light.

I saw Ellie in a different light on that beach. Away from the school run and the homework sheet and the question of the reading levels, she was just a child with an engineering problem and the sea, and the view was uncomplicated.

I will take it.

A note on the sun cream

We have since switched to a different application method — spray-on, which reduces the resistance significantly, apparently because the cold-and-sticky sensation is reduced when it is not being applied by hand.

This is the most practical piece of advice in this post. I include it because it represents three years of accumulated parent knowledge that I am providing without charge.

The spray-on sun cream: recommended.