Family ties ... (left to right) Harry with his grandfather in Whitby, and daughter Maisie enjoying the same spot
Last week my partner Catherine, 12-year-old daughter Maisie and I got out a big box of family photographs and spent a rainy afternoon looking through them. One envelope was filled with pictures from a three-week trip around Sweden we had taken when Maisie was five. Here she was standing alongside inept policemen Kling and Klang at Astrid Lindgren World near Vimmerby, here alighting from the big wheel at the The Gröna Lund Tivoli in Stockholm, and here paddling in the Baltic on the island of Öland.
"It's funny", Catherine said to Maisie, "but in all these photos you look quite cross."
"That's because I was," Maisie replied.
"What, didn't you enjoy that holiday?" I asked
"Nooo," Maisie said thoughtfully, "I did like it. But I'd have liked it a lot more if I could have understood what everyone was saying. Or how anything worked."
In some ways children are like dogs. What seems fresh and exciting to those in charge is bewildering and unnerving to them. Listening to Maisie I recalled a meal in Operakallaren, one of Stockholm's grandest restaurants. Catherine and I ate crayfish in dill-scented broth, while our daughter tucked into a plate of mini frankfurters and chips that the kindly headwaiter had sensibly offered her as an alternative to the Michelin-starred entrees on the a la carte. As adults, we look for new tastes and experiences. Children, by and large, want something they've had before. They like the comfort of familiarity. That's why they wear the same T-shirt until it disintegrates.
"I liked Sweden," Maisie said. "But I liked it when we went to Whitby better." They speak English in Whitby, of course, though if you didn't grow up in North Yorkshire, you might struggle to pick that up. Maisie had never been to Whitby before that holiday, but I had been there so often through my life that it was like she'd absorbed knowledge of the place in her DNA.
We did all the things I had done during my childhood holidays in nearby Ruswarp. She rode on the ponies at Robin Hood's Bay, the rides presided over by a man so ancient and weather-beaten he resembled a petrified stump, and we went to the marine wildlife centre, set in a dark cave and featuring two cod, three plaice, a skate and a lugubrious looking eel. We bought trinket boxes covered with shells, rock in the shape of false-teeth and walked through the whale's jawbones. My only sadness was to find that the Khyber Pass Café had disappeared, thus removing the possibility of a nutritious meal of spaghetti hoops on toast followed by a knickerbocker glory eaten with a foot-long spoon.
If you are lucky there is a sense of continuity that runs through the life of a family, something that manifests itself in silly "traditions" and in-jokes that live on long past the point where their origins or even the people who invented them are forgotten. Holidays are part of that thread.
So what threads do you remember from your childhood holidays? And would you revisit the holidays of your youth?
