Parents worry about summertime sadness – but a holiday is all about quality time

It was cloudy all week. I’d shelled out the dough for a villa in Brittany months ago. I’d packed up the car, checked the tyre pressure, caught the overnight ferry from Portsmouth and driven for hours to get to our Airbnb. And yet, for seven grey days of our holiday, we barely got a glimpse of the sun. 

Still, we played cards and watched TV and read our books and enjoyed a few nice meals. We managed to have a laugh and relax which are very much my priorities when it comes to holidays. Sunshine and heat are pleasant in small doses but seriously overrated components of a holiday. High temperatures make me boring, lazy and irritable. At least grey skies feel familiar, offsetting the otherwise alienating business of being abroad. 

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

My daughter didn’t seem happy. “Morning!” I would beam at her every day across the breakfast table. She would roll her eyes and point at the skies accusingly, as if it was all my fault. In the car, she commandeered the playlist and imposed back-to-back Lana Del Rey all week. I took it to be some sort of protest. I mean, I love a bit of Lana now and again but it’s hardly family singalong Club Tropicana stuff is it? 

I am constantly judging my own parental performance: am I caring enough, understanding enough, hands-on enough and yet, at the same time, laid back and fun enough? Am I a role model? Also, am I generous enough? Do I literally give them enough nice things? I am aware this makes me sound like I have an insane Daddy Warbucks complex.

I know that aspiring to lavish my offspring with ruinous pampering and material indulgences is superficial and ridiculous. But what can I tell you? I am a product of a deranged consumerist culture, shaped like everyone else by cynical marketing, TV, Hollywood movies and a childhood spent pouring over the Argos catalogue like it was a holy scripture. Not that I’m saying society is entirely to blame. I am, independent of environmental factors, a bit of a twat. 

• Sam Delaney: ‘We always wanted a puppy… now it’s chaos’
• Sam Delaney’s guide to surviving a family party

On holiday I have a particular tendency to critique myself harshly. I allow a single week of the year to symbolise my entire fathering record. Am I giving these kids a good life? Am I providing them with precious memories they will treasure forever? Or will they be the sort of kids who one day tell stories about how miserable and stingy their childhoods were because their old man was a pathetic schlub who couldn’t even predict that Brittany in late July would be all drizzly and bleak? 

For the record, in case my parents are reading, I absolutely loved every single holiday they took me on as a kid. I have particularly fond memories of my mum taking us to a caravan park in the Isle of Wight in the Easter of 1985, where we drank tea and watched Dennis Taylor beat Steve Davis in the snooker final on a small portable telly. My brother Cas, who was 17, got so bored by day three that he stole the rental car we had arrived in and tore around the campsite, terrorising holidaymakers and knocking down laundry lines. I found it thrilling. 

My dad took us on very different types of holidays: rented houses in France or Italy, with their own pools, where he would encourage us to eat the local food while disapproving of our foul language and council estate diction. We didn’t live with him back home, so weeks away in his company often felt like a performance, in which we had to be the kids he might have hoped us to be: polite, sophisticated, a bit posh. I never quite pulled that off.

But who was I to complain? I had an all-expenses paid fortnight in the sun, with Orangina on tap and all the olives I could eat. I knew he loved us and just wanted us to have a nice time. And we did. 

Parenthood is the stuff that happens in the little moments, day to day: the hugs in front of the telly, the late-night chats, the little inside jokes you share over WhatsApp, the hobbies you share, the support you give each other when times are rough. This is where connections are made. Buying stuff, organising holidays, cultivating a cosmetic sheen for your family unit is neither here nor there. As a son, I know all that. As a dad, I sometimes need to remind myself. 

Read more from Sam Delaney here.

Sort Your Head Out: Mental Health Without All the Bollocks by Sam Delaney is out now (Constable £12.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. Big Issue exists to give homeless and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy of the magazine or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.