My romantic vision of a family road trip — hijacked by Paw Patrol, iPads and a family bag of Skittles

Sam Leith
Sam Leith23 July 2018
WEST END FINAL

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"Dad, I’m BOOORED!!” “Bored! BORED? You can’t be bloody bored. We’re still parked in the drive. I haven’t even put your seat-belt on yet.” First exchange of our holiday road-trip conversation. Only 12 hours and 695 miles to go.

My wife having cleverly arranged to be working, unexpectedly, over the first 48 hours of our summer holiday, it fell to me to drive three under-10s from north London to within spitting distance of Toulouse solo. And yet — once I’d rewatched the Mad Max movies to get in the zone, psychologically — I was prepared for the trip.

I was even looking forward to it. Just us: father-and-children bonding time. I wanted to say: remember this, children. Look: you’ll be able to tell your kids what the M20 looked like before it was a 40-mile car park for artics. They’ll marvel as you describe how you were once able to wave a passport and visit France with no visa, no rad-suit, no gasoline for barter … just a cash card and a phone that worked on both sides of the Channel.

And their mother having fed them a musical diet of Michael Jackson and The Beatles, I’d downloaded Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band Live 1975-1985, and Trompe Le Monde by Pixies. I had visions of coasting around the Paris peripherique to Bird Dream of the Olympus Mons, of stop-starting on the North Circular with Born to Run blaring from the windows and my offspring punching the air.

Man proposes; God disposes. In the event, the journey was soundtracked from the moment we passed Muswell Hill by the tinny yapping of Paw Patrol season seven. I don’t want to say “kids these days”, but: kids these days!

Remember road trips in the Seventies and Eighties? You made your own entertainment, viz asking “Are we there yet?” every seven minutes for the duration of the journey. Nothing to keep you frosty but the high likelihood of bloody death in a map-reading-related collision when your lack of a seat-belt sent you through the windscreen. Golden times.

Long-distance car travel with kids today is all about battery life and blood- sugar management. Forget sibling rivalry. My youngest routinely starts fist fights with truckers if a mealtime is delayed.

I kept a freezer bag of sandwiches and oat bars in the passenger footwell. At the first sign of a growl, I’d toss one backwards over my shoulder like the guy feeding fish to the orcas at SeaWorld. For emergencies I had a family bag of Skittles, but only because you can’t get Ambien in WH Smith.

"Long-distance car travel with children today is all about battery life and blood-sugar management" 

We live in an age in which boredom is harder and harder to come by. Our children aren’t culturally or neurologically equipped for it. Nor are most of us. I worry about that. Tolerating boredom is a vital part of what adulthood is about. And, for that matter, what going on holiday is about.

Anyway, we’re here now, and it’s sunny and gorgeous, and the youngest is asking why we have to stay, and for how long. I’ll give him the iPad .

Starving puffins will make the English lion roar again

Those bloody Danes. Just because the Russians are poisoning our pedestrians, the Americans are dissing our Queen and the Croatians are beating us at football, they think it’s OK for anyone to have a go.

It’s reported that for no better reason than they control 94 per cent of the sand-eel quota in UK waters, Danish fishermen have been making off with all our sand eels, and now our proud national puffin community — uncommon partial to sand eels — is starving to death.

A mangy lion we may be but a lion we remain. And a small war against some seafaring Scandinavian types may be just what we need to bring the nation together: something we can all get behind. What red-blooded Englishman doesn’t like puffins — or, for that matter, sand eels?

It’s not that long since the last Scandi who tried this sort of ratbaggery, Norwegian Harald Hardrada, was sent packing by Harold Godwinson at Stamford Bridge.

Nota bene, Danes.

Beware the posh girl scorned

Lizzie Purbrick
PA

I like the cut of Lizzie Purbrick’s jib. This ex Olympic horsewoman caught her Tory peer lover cheating on her, and instead of posting his nudes to Reddit and ordering him delivery pizzas at odd hours, she daubed “lady slut”, “whore” and “big dick lord” on the walls of his flat in pig’s blood.

She went too far, though, in boasting that she was the original for a character in Jilly Cooper’s Riders. Jilly says she doesn’t recall her and points out that “she spelt ‘whore’ with an ‘h’ in one place, and without an ‘h’ in another place”. Aren’t toffs brilliant?

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