As the parent of small children, my ideal holiday would consist of three weeks spent incommunicado in a sterile white cube. Imagine it: no spilled cordial, no Duplo underfoot, nobody warbling hysterically when you try to put on their socks. Just noiseless, colourless peace. But googling “sterile white cube holiday” turns up nothing useful, so we have brought the kids to Cascais, Portugal, for a week, instead.
I say “we”, but really I mean my wife, the booker of tickets and the maker of plans, who might perhaps insist on me spelling out this aspect of our trip. Throughout the week, at any rate, she keeps talking about a meme she has seen in which a husband gets on a plane with no idea of where he’s going or where his passport is or what activities the kids will be doing; his wife has organised it all. I can’t really comment on its accuracy.
What I can say is that after 2½ hours on a plane I look up to find myself in Cascais, a town on the Portuguese Riviera, a 40-minute drive from Lisbon. We canvass various Portuguese people about how to pronounce Cascais and get various answers: either you imagine a person from Newry saying “cash cows” or you broaden your vowels and slur your Ss and end up with something like “Kash-kishe”.
However you say it, Cascais has historically been a summer bolt-hole for Lisbon’s upper crust. The Portuguese royal family used to drop in every September, and the modern town is dotted with royal palaces and terraced mansions in the museum phase of their senescence. Beyond the town centre, in the palm-shaded side-streets, stand crumbling villas, of the sort in which, it is easy to imagine, linen-suited adherents of the old regime still moulder and plot.
The town also has hotels, boulangeries, beaches and a marina. Rich kids from Lisbon travel here via Uber to take photographs of themselves in swimsuits. Rich nutbrown men retire here in an ambience of yachts and refrigerated boutiques.
Pale Irish people come here by the planeload, hauling suitcases and buggies and junior infants. That’s us! We woke the kids at 4am and drove to the airport. We parked the car and got the bus to Terminal 2. I’ve written two quite simple sentences there, but I am not describing a simple operation. It has been accomplished in the same way that the boat is eventually carried over the mountain in the movie Fitzcarraldo.
“Where’s your backpack?” my wife asks our son, as we brace ourselves for security.
“It’s in the car,” he says happily.
So back Daddy goes on the long-term parking transfer bus to retrieve the backpack, with its precious contents: the rice cakes, the Hot Wheels monster trucks, the PJ Masks action figurines. It is 5.30am.
“Why do you keep going on holiday with small kids?” a friend asked us recently, in tones of wonder and scorn. Why indeed. Because they love it? Because we hate ourselves? Because we need a holiday? Because the sterile white cube option is unavailable? Because sometimes you just have to move a boat over a mountain in order to feel alive?
Perhaps the most salient characteristic of children under six is that they are not really amenable to things. Our three-year-old son, for instance, has an almost Ian Paisley-like gift for saying No. Nonetheless, by means of lures and treats and tantrums (the tantrums, I confess, were mostly mine), we get everyone breakfasted and on the plane. Our spell aloft is beguiled by iPad painting games, visits to the toilet, and copious snacks. Then we are in Portugal, where it is very hot out. Our taxi driver zooms us to Cascais at 120kph, changing lanes like an assassin.
“I want to go back to Portugal,” says our son, as we arrive at the hotel. He seems to think the plane trip was the holiday. Would that we were all so easily satisfied. His five-year-old big sister explains that we are, indeed, now in Portugal, though her grasp of what exactly Portugal is seems pretty shaky.
From the kids’ point of view, in any case, Portugal is basically just a nice hotel: the Vila Galé Cascais, where, except for a single couple in their 20s who appear to have chosen this particular hotel by mistake, literally every guest is either a parent minding young children or a young child being minded (and literally every guest is either from Ireland or the UK).
As anyone who has ever minded small children in an unfamiliar environment will tell you, minding small children in an unfamiliar environment is quite stressful. I’ve been minding small children for almost six years now, but the thing that continues to amaze me is that you cannot leave small children alone even for a single microsecond, because if you do, they will die, get lost, be kidnapped, break something, hurt themselves, or choke to death on something they found on the floor.
We therefore spend much of our holiday in a state of parental red alert. The first three days put us through the worst of this, we agree. But then we crack it, that mysterious holiday alchemy, and we move from Defcon 4 to Defcon 3: if we’re not exactly relaxed, we’re no longer strung up tight as two violin strings, either.
The hit of the holiday is the swimming pool, of course. Vila Galé Cascais has two: a spatula-shaped one for grown-ups and tweens, and a little square one for toddlers. The pools are overlooked by the hotel itself, with its cellular, balconied facade. Between them is a stubby lawn of chlorine-toughened grass.
Elaborate pool prep: swimsuits, Crocs, floaties, sunscreen, inflatable zebra. Our son wears a little flapped hat that makes him look like the cutest soldier in the French Foreign Legion.
My wife and I spend four hours a day knee-deep in tepid water, while the kids regress to some earlier, water-based evolutionary stage of human development. What I’m saying is that they go feral. But everyone else’s kids have gone feral, too. We exchange the parental nod with other mums and dads. Aren’t kids the best? Are you also panicking inwardly?
We marvel at the parents of older children, who are able to lie in their loungers and read books for extended periods of time. Can this be our future? Does utopia await? “Daddy, do the thing I say!” my son instructs. Obediently, and for the thousandth time today, I refill the dolphin-shaped water pistol that he has named “Whaley”.
On the Tuesday an ocean fog rolls in off the Atlantic. The damp air tastes of salt. We venture into Cascais proper, in search of coffee and a playground. Narrow streets of yellow cobbles. A park infested with roosters, ducks, terrapins. “Ruh-reh-ruh-ROOOOOOO!” the roosters say. “Silly roosters!” says my daughter. “Everyone’s awake already!”
Our daughter loves art, so the following day I suggest we visit the Paula Rego museum.
“Won’t that be a bit disturbing for her, though,” my wife says. “She’s at a pre-abstract stage of development.”
“Oh, she’ll be fine,” I say.
In the museum we find Rego’s sequence of paintings that horrifyingly depict scenes of female genital mutilation.
“I may have called that one wrong,” I say.
In the evening, we walk down to the Marina for dinner. Aside from a range of quite good seafood restaurants, the marina has two kinds of shop. The first kind assumes that you are a wealthy tourist and tries to sell you nice clothes and bags. The second kind assumes that you are a millionaire and tries to sell you boats.
In one of the restaurants we persuade our daughter to try calamari for the first time: a hit. Squid and traumatising art on the same holiday: what more could you ask for?
On the way back to the hotel we cross a stone bridge that totters over a tidal inlet. Some local teenage boys are daring each other to jump from the parapet. Our son watches, hypnotised. The lurching freefall, then the splash! The old palaces and the new hotels look bronze-trimmed in the evening sun. One day, our son will grow up and do daredevil things, like jump off bridges into the cold Atlantic. He will feel absolutely alive. As he does now, unthinkingly, as I hold him in my arms.
There will be plenty of time for the sterile white cube, I think. And why would I want that, anyway – the place where nothing happens? I’d rather jump off the bridge. Isn’t that why I had kids in the first place?
