They’ve packed too much, surely? The cabin crew do not look thrilled as I try to help squeeze each bag into the overhead lockers or the footwells under the seats in front. My 19-year-old has brought five and a half bikinis – we are away for a week – and her sister, four. (For comparison, I’ve taken my one and only pair of trunks.) The 19-year-old’s boyfriend has mercifully adopted a more minimal approach – just one wheelie for him – while the 17-year-old’s best friend has a different outfit for every day.
If there is an unusual sense of excitement among us right now, then it’s because of the extra human baggage in tow. The fact that each daughter has been permitted a plus-one on our family summer holiday this year means that we can still be together, but mostly apart.
It’s how they like it these days.
It happened slowly at first, and then all at once. We had previously been a tight family of four who enjoyed each other’s company and loved going abroad. But then the girls grew fully into their Kevin and Perry years, and abruptly our holidays became protracted affairs, pierced by arguments, sulking and occasional stormings off, my wife’s attempts at diplomacy mostly failing. One daughter wanted the beach, the other the swimming pool, and then both decided they would much rather just stay in bed all day. Their phones made everything so much worse.
I was ready to give up on such holidays altogether, but my wife persisted. Our last attempt was two years ago. I recall one particular evening in Skiathos, when the then 17-year-old announced she was craving cocktails, so we went to a bar filled with young people and bought three full-powered ones and a non-alcoholic equivalent for the 15-year-old. The gesture failed. We sat in silence as my daughter fumed at our very presence (me in sandals), and I reeled at the €50 bar bill.
Each of us by now wanted different things from our time away. There was bickering over breakfast options and wifi reliability, while my wife maintained the conviction that any loose collection of bricks upon the island – which she quaintly termed “historical ruins” – was worth a 30-minute trek in 32C heat to go visit. All I wanted to do was sit in a cafe with a sea view and read my book.
Which is why this summer we said yes to them bringing guests. Add to the soup to dilute the soup. We’re in southern Spain. Here, the 19-year-old wants only to tan, the 17-year-old to swim in the pool. The boyfriend wants a football to kick, while the friend wants to have “fun”.
“Relax,” my wife tells me. “It’ll be fine.”
We arrive in Seville to thick heat and cicadas, and an immediate atmosphere of crop tops and flip-flops. Our hire car is enormous, a seven-seater, which the teens fill with pale, sprawled limbs. They are asleep within seconds of us hitting the motorway. It’s two hours to Cádiz, and I keep turning to look at them, to make sure they’re OK, these people we’re required to keep alive for the next seven days. When our daughters were younger, we would routinely meet their friends’ mothers and fathers, but all this stopped the moment they reached secondary school, when it became paramount to keep parents hidden over fears of public embarrassment.
And so these are the children of strangers, essentially. The weight of responsibility hangs heavy. Whenever we go away, the dog-sitter sends us photographs of the dog, presumably to show us that she is safe and well. Should we be doing the same here for the kids’ parents, and have them holding up today’s newspaper to confirm the date?
“I’ll deal with it,” my wife says, a woman with more numbers in her phone book than I have in mine.
We are staying in the small coastal town of Zahara de los Atunes, famed locally for its tuna, and where Spanish tourists appear to outnumber Brits by 99 to one. It is close to midnight when we arrive. The air-con is complicated, and the bedroom fans appear stricken with seizures. I’m exhausted, but the children experience a second wind. They want to go into town, which is a 20-minute walk or five minutes in the car. One of us will have to take them. We toss for it. My wife loses.
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Each morning, we awake to a mausoleum silence as they sleep off the effects of the night before. There are leftovers from their post-midnight snacks on the kitchen table, alongside the dregs of sticky alcoholic drinks, which the ants have found and are now busy informing all their friends about. My wife and I enjoy a quiet breakfast on the balcony, then pad early to the beach before the winds pick up. (By afternoon, the wind here, known as the levante, is strong enough to lift you from your towel and carry you across the Strait of Gibraltar before depositing you in Morocco.) We check our phones repeatedly for signs that the young ones have woken. When they do rouse, gone midday, they send us a list of requirements from the supermarket: chips and Haribo and Bacardi. We buy them fresh ingredients for summer salads instead.
All of us revert helplessly to type. We nag them about sunscreen and riptides, and make sure they know where the calamine lotion is. They sigh and mutter “yes, yes” and then ignore everything. We encourage them to drink plenty of water, and we navigate the minor squabbles that arise with nothing like aplomb. (It is too hot for aplomb.)
My wife suggests excursions, the usual tourist preoccupations: souvenir shops, a museum, one of those churches with the nice stained windows. But none of them seem much fussed. They want rum. I, meanwhile, have the latest Sally Rooney and 800 pages of Helen Garner’s diaries to get through.
We do occasionally come together as a group, like normal people. One day, we drive an hour to Cádiz, its picturesque old town full of narrow streets and a vibrant food market. We eat tapas and drink wine, and the plus-ones listen patiently while we tell silly family stories in the way that all families do – and, as with all families, probably reveal ourselves as eccentric at best, or else certifiably mad. But they tolerate us, the plus-ones, and that’s the main thing. It’s a lovely evening.
There’s a curious anticipation in the air when the time comes to go home. My wife and I are staying on for a few more days to explore the region in a smaller hire car, while the kids are returning for August jobs to help fund college and university.
At the departure gate, I surprise myself by crying. All four of them look so beautiful and tanned, glowing with youth and vitality, their wrists full of friendship bracelets. I watch them stride away, specifically towards customs but also on into adulthood, without us, and I am overcome with emotion and love. I want them to come back, to extend the family holiday, because I’m not ready to consign it to the past, not just yet. But I know, too, that this is life; that it’s wise to let them go, be free.
“Safe flight,” I cry out to them, a little too loudly. “Please remember to text when you land. Call me!”
