Taking a Holiday is Different from Taking a Risk

Travelling with infants is not easy. Even short distances within England, when we got in the car at the front door at one end and got out of the car at my parents' front door at the other, presented their moments. Memorable was the evening when the lupin plants in the boot yielded their cargo of large, black garden spiders that swarmed over the back seat onto the shrieking, strapped in, small HGs, half way along the M6. Not a lot of stopping places on the motorway. Never was a service area so welcome; I hope the spiders are thriving in the curiously suburban lupin patch at the field's edge.

Tuscany was an expeditionary force affair, and the stay was for all summer. At the other end was house, community, perfect linguistic communications, cars, doctors, the village, and all the rooms and toys that lived there, from last time. Still we would sink exhausted into familiarity and shadowed respite from the brilliant sunlit world. Even then, things went wrong. Arriving at the airport without passport (classic) in those days it was possible to leave with a stern warning that it might be tricky getting back in. At Rome the control officer gave up on my Italian, turned to the seething Italian families beyond the barriers and yelled "who owns this Signora and babies?". Mr HG (who had driven previously with the baggage train) stepped smartly forward "Mine!" So off we went. Not like that now.

What ever are people thinking of, going without support, without language, without child care, for a few days to places at the ends of the earth? The Earth ends where there is no connexion, no infrastructure, no permanence. Go to some of these holiday villages in the winter and then the isolation, the desolation can be understood. There is a reason why these places were undeveloped or abandoned until very recently. As well, during the summer vacation it isn't just the schools that shut from early June to early September - all services close down because everyone is on the beach or up a mountain. The sight of the halt, the lame and the sick caring for one another in a summer ward in hospital is for those lucky enough to get to a hospital and be admitted at all, in case of need.

Adults can cope, and it's their choice. Infants should be denied exit visas so great are the risks to which they are exposed on so-called holidays.