From here to paternity

Something to Declare

BY SAM DELANEY
LIKE most blokes, I like to imagine myself as a sophisticated and urbane global traveller. In my mind I’m just like Tony Curtis or Roger Moore in The Persuaders – an international man of mystery who is both elegant and masculine, even when dressed in a cream linen suit, some espadrilles and a mauve chiffon neckerchief. In reality, I am just another one of those pasty-skinned dingbats you see in the departure lounge trying to scrape melted Toblerone off his boarding card.

But at least now that I’m a dad it all feels more natural. Dads are supposed to be rubbish on holiday, aren’t they? Mine was. I never lived with him, but once a year he would take me away on a two-week trip during which I would witness his ludicrous, sun-stricken conduct with open-mouthed horror. He would chase imaginary snakes with a broom, clip foreign children around the ear for making too much noise while he was trying to kip, and he once threatened to push a holiday rep’s car into the sea. Another time he loaded our luggage onto a roof rack and refused to secure it with bungees, exclaiming: “Gravity will keep it in place!” As I watched my carefully packed holiday clothes flying across the dirty Sardinian highway I wondered if Italian laws of gravity differed from our own. “Bleedin’ shabby foreign gravity!” I thought. “Good oldfashioned British gravity would have held those cases in place!” Suffice it to say, I spent the rest of the holiday dressed in my pants and a borrowed beach towel.

Now it’s my turn to be Holiday Dad. When I take my one-year-old daughter on her first foreign trip this month I can relax into my role, hold up my hands and declare to anyone who’s listening: yes, I am a moron. Yes, I started an argument at check-in with a nun who I was convinced was trying to push in. Yes, I can’t work out how to use the air conditioning in my hired Fiat Punto and have to drive with all the windows open. Yes, I got an ear infection from the swimming pool on day one and have subsequently had to spend most of the trip indoors, using dodgy-looking ear drops prescribed by a moustachioed doctor who had a fag hanging out of his mouth. But I am a dad and that is my right, damn you! Now, can everyone make sure they’ve been to the toilet before we set off?