We’re on our first family holiday with ‘two of ‘em’. It’s sweltering by day and night and the heat has coincided with another leap by the baby. A leap of development, perhaps, but all it feels like is a ‘leap’ out of bed at 2am, 4am, 5am and whatever he’s having himself. By day, the nightyard shift feels like childs-play compared to tag-teaming to simultaneously juggling a baby and toddler in the air. Someone once said to me that with kids, usually one of four things is needed when behaviour has gone awry: food, water, sleep or a poo. The waking hours feel like a perpetual walk through a maze filled with these demons.
Peace comes in the form of a take-away pizza after the kids have gone to bed, purchased from the café-shop adjoining our holiday resort. It’s almost half-eight the second time I go to collect one, and the spectacled manageress, a trace of sweat along the rim of her hair, is still working away. She’s been here since we first visited the shop twelve hours earlier, yet still a smile for everyone as ‘Bon appetite’ or ‘Bon soir’ glides from her mouth for each customer.
‘Combien du temps?’ I ask defiantly in pigeon French (a strange laboratory pigeon at that).
‘Vent minutes,’ she confirms and before me lays the mirage of time standing still with none of the four imperatives looming down on me. I had brought my book to the café – started, half-read, half-re-started, forgotten, half-unforgotten over the past year – to reconnect with during the waiting time. I sit in the café’s outdoor dining area and start reading when the bustle of the adjoining restaurant meets my ears. There is no chance for a beer by the pool or a meal in the restaurant on this holiday. This is my choice, my true self declares.
I walk over to the restaurant and see two small, lonely, empty circular tables at the end of the stretch of tables. Couples and families from Germany, France, Britain, Denmark, Luxembourg and the Netherlands are eating with great civility and joy, parents forming everlasting memories of their children’s first holidays and holiday meals in restaurants.
‘Excuse moi,’ I say, confronting a roaming waiter. ‘C’est possible utiliser la table for un biere pour dix minutes?’ the pigeon flaps again, the functional lexicon revealing my agenda. My words contain pleading.
He nods, understands.
I ask what beers he has. All of the them are standard European, the brands that sponsor football and colonise television screens — all except Monaco, which I’d seen the tap for but know nothing about.
For what feels like thirty seconds I sip on my beer and try and re-connect with Turgenev’s ‘Fathers and Sons’. Too many thoughts of my own sons, my wife, my life, my holiday; too many sounds and sights around me; occupy my mind. I read a paragraph or two before stopping to just sit and be.
The beer is sweet and fizzy, the alcoholic equivalent of a liquid cartoon. Turns out afterwards it’s a fruity beer-based cocktail with a dash of Grenadine in it. The bar is noisy. But it doesn’t matter. I grabbed the one chance for an eight-minute beer. It could have been any bar and anywhere.
‘You know last night when I was waiting for the pizzas,’ I said to my wife the next day, ‘I grabbed a beer at the bar.’
An expletive is fired back at me. ‘Good the **** on ya,’ she says. ‘You gotta take these chances. Them’s the moments on a holiday.’
This isn’t a review of a place or a drink. It’s a plea to young parents with little time in life, particularly in times ostensibly about taking time off. Whether it’s the west of Ireland, south of France, Guinness or something with Grenadine, seize them moments.
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