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I was hoping for my holiday in Cheddar to give me some plot lines and jokes for series 4 of Relativity and so far I have not been disappointed. My only regret is not having put my accommodation costs (we’re in a spooky Air BnB in a nearby village) down as a business expense, given how much this is going to help my work. But you can’t have everything.
We’d been out for lunch in the gorge, my dad naively thinking we’d be able to park in the 50 space car park at the bottom of the geographical feature, but of course it was packed and the Gorge was thronging with tourists. This was pretty impressive as both of the show caves have been closed for Covid and then controversially not reopened. Which is a tragedy for the town and also, this month at least, seemingly throwing money away. But I was glad to see that there were still plenty of tourists.
I ended up parking a mile or so away by my old middle school (having dropped everyone else at the restaurant) and as always, bizarre to see what had changed and was the same. It’s about 40+ years since I was last in this part of town and the roads seemed smaller and the shop where I bought blackcurrant sweets has been replaced with houses. Were the thick trees alongside the road saplings back in 1977? I remembered going conkering back about then down by the river and there was one big tree down there, but also a house. They have built houses on every spare patch of ground in this place.
The meal was very good and I enjoyed looking out over the passing families walking up the gorge. There seemed to be a lot of middle aged couples dragging along sad looking, slouching teenagers with their bottom lips sticking out, forced, one last time, to go on holiday with their folks.
We then took the kids to play crazy golf, which was mainly stressful and a bit too packed, but the kids said they’d had fun, even though they seemed to cry through most of it. We were pretty exhausted by the time we were back at my parents (who’d travelled home after the meal). The kids played chase, which then descended into squirting with the hose with them in just their pants, which then became more anarchic as they started smearing themselves in mud. My mum remarked that I had done the same thing when I was 28 years old (not really when I was about 3) and I remember doing so, or maybe just remember looking at the photo. Catie washed her hands of it all, but I said it was fun and I’d deal with the aftermath. My mum said that it was fine, because it was just so lovely to see them.
I then had to carry two soily wet children up to the bath, shedding dirt as we went and the bath became a pool of soil and mud so having got most of the muck off I gave them both a shower as well. Then when I dried a clean Ernie I finally took off his pants to find there was a lot of mud caked around his nether regions too. Which gave us all a laugh. I tried to clean the bath and the bathroom but it looked like a black and white Jackson Pollock painting. Mum said she didn’t mind, because it was so lovely to have them there.
Phoebe got clean and dressed, but Ernie’s clothes and got damp and so were in the spin dryer. He came back into the garden and I was sure he was going to get muddy again, but it was going to be worse than that. He had enjoyed the permitted anarchy of getting filthy and wanted to up the ante. He was running around nude and then declared he needed a wee and stood like a statue of a some ancient hero as he let rip into the bushes. Everyone laughed and mum said it wasn’t a problem because it was so lovely to be with the family.
Then Ernie declared he was going to do a poo in the garden. I thought he was joking. He’s quite shy and private about this kind of stuff and has never pooed in public since he was out of nappies. But he ran to the edge of the garden and looked like he was trying. To be fair to him, everyone had been enjoying his antics and he had gone so far that he had nowhere else to go. I ran to stop him pooing in the garden, but he ran away on to the path and his bum looked like something might be going on.
He then pooed on the path by the fish pond.
Like a proper poo.
It turns out comedy can go too far. Though a proportion of the audience were still amused by the audacity and the miracle of the unexpected. His parents were embarrassed by this dirty protest (though one of us was suppressing laughter) and I didn’t notice my mum say that she didn’t mind because it was just so nice to have the kids here. Turns out that pooing on her pathways might be the step too far.
It was a baller move and I cleaned up the sticky poo and mum said she’d jet wash the rest. It was a weird end to a nice day and I assume this will be a family joke for the rest of Ernie’s life. But wow, what are you supposed to do with that? None of the parenting books talk about this. And I had some sympathy with my boy, who was caught up in the madness of the day and to whom the distinction between playing in mud and weeing in a bush and pooing on a path must be somewhat cloudy.
I went out with my old schoolmates Brian and Geoff tonight to the White Hart where we drank as teenagers. No Give Us A Break quiz machine any more, but it was fun to try and pretend the last 35 years haven’t happened. And lovely to catch up with them.
