Holidays - and children...

When our girls were very little, we would, like most families, try and go on holiday in the summer.

Once, we started the holiday a bit before the end of term (this is going back a bit, before education bureaucrats became the harbingers of authority, knowing what they ‘do’ – bugger me, they’re really clever these people aren’t they!), and we got away earlier with a letter to their Headmaster, saying the girls would record in a diary, all the days they had away from school, and draw pictures etc. He liked that, and so we wrote the ‘Holiday diary’, with grave importance. It was read out to the class when they got back.

We still have all these diaries; some are really battered and show stains ranging from egg and orange juice in the earlier ones, down (or up) to red wine, beer and Calvados, in the later years.

I love these precious books.

We always laughed, each year, when I bought a new notebook to write down all the things that would make me, and hopefully the others, happy, and bring something to enjoy when we were much older. I usually filled in the days, filling in the pages with gibberish and sometimes ‘pissed talk’, but there are also so many paragraphs and hand drawn pictures, written by our two girls, and Mrs S herself!

These records of all we did when we were younger, more carefree, more responsible, and easier to talk with, are still carefully stored – and often looked at when we can’t agree where we saw etc etc...

And they are treasures.