Dad’s Diary

The summer holidays have again crept up on us. We go through our workaday, busy lives with a vague notion of respite at some distant time, until suddenly you realise that the long-promised date with idleness is next Friday. Then, panic ensues. Getting ready for holidays means work: there’s grass to be cut, bills to be paid, clothes to be washed and packed and a million little things to be organised before the off. The car is then stacked high with bags and kids. We were barely a mile down the road before I once again awakened to a hard truth learned through bitter experience: a holiday with four young kids is not relaxing. It can be fun, it can be very enjoyable, and it might even be magical, but it is certainly not relaxing. It’s a 24-hour job, looking after and entertaining four small people.

Like many other families, we were happy to holiday at home in Ireland in this second summer of Covid. The shifting regulatory landscape around coronavirus meant that foreign travel was too uncertain. However, we still did get to go overseas – well, across a body of water in any event – to a gorgeous island off the West Cork coast. With no holiday homes or hotels to be had, I had hatched a plan for us to holiday on board the old ketch I’ve been fixing up this past while. Usually, just two or three stay on board. This time, we were going to squeeze all six of us in for a week.

Boat

I had brought the boat down weeks beforehand to prepare her, and I had even done a few training weekends with the small kids for a couple of nights at a time. We were tied up alongside, which made life easier, as the kids could go ashore to run and play when they needed to. We all piled on board merrily upon arrival and, before long, the older kids were swimming off the back, while the smaller ones were catching crabs off the side. Keeping our three-year-old from falling in was a task from which there was no holiday, but we managed to keep her dry for the most part.

Each day, we went out and explored the island. The kids were entranced to discover a magical hidden cove with white sands, overhung with lush vegetation. It was a place more reminiscent of the tropics than the Irish Atlantic coast. We trekked our way along the clifftops to the crumbling old towers, which stand guard over the bay. More than once, the awe-inspiring views of the moody mountains across the bay stopped us in our tracks.

We found plenty time for swimming, fishing and snorkelling, and on those rare evenings when the kids – wearied from all the action – actually went to sleep willingly, my wife and I shared some welcome moments of peace, as the summer dusk deepened in the harbour, and the first stars appeared. In one such rare and quiet moment, a heretical thought stirred in my mind. Could it be that, just maybe, a holiday spent with four young kids in a confined space can be relaxing? All that is needed, it seems, is for the kids to be unconscious.