Kids on long-car journeys? Take me to the Chunderdome – Susan Morrison

Who piles a young child in a car for a non-stop 260-mile journey anyway? It’s bad enough when everyone is healthy and they do your head in with the constant demands to know if we’re there yet. Answer, no. We’re just leaving the end of the street.

Two in the back is even worse. It’s why many a mother behind the wheel looks like a deranged Mad Max driver. The screams alone convince you that the car has turned into a kind of Thunderdome on wheels. Two go in, one comes out.

Young parents now have the advantage of portable entertainment devices to keep the endless questions under control. No, we don’t know why that truck is blasting his horn at us. No, we don’t know why all those men are standing in a row at the side of the road beside the bus with the brightly coloured stripy scarves hanging out of the window, and why two of them are showing their bottoms to the passing traffic, and no, you can’t do that. And no, we don’t know what the castle is called. Just be glad your father can see it. It’s been years since he got his eyes tested.

They may be entertained, but science hasn’t solved the real terror of the long-distance car trip, the backseat boak. My kids were brilliant at it. The girlchild was a queen of timing. I recall a long trip home from Sheffield to Abbeyhill. She was a little diamond until Abbeymount, scarcely five minutes from the house, and that’s when she chose to go full-on Exorcist. It took nearly an hour to clean the interior, whilst she was tucked up happily in bed.

My son had a special talent. He could hurl far enough to hit the windscreen. I remember absent-mindedly turning on the windscreen wipers and vaguely wondering why they weren’t clearing the combination of strawberry milkshake and Frosties. Don’t judge me, it was all he would eat for breakfast at that time.

We all have war stories of vomit on wheels. My friend Cath has twins. When they were small, they were flower girls at her niece’s Highland wedding. Cathy had chosen a cream suit to wear, with a lovely full-brimmed hat.

The colour turned out to be a good idea, since you couldn’t really see the damage, at least, not in the photos. But when you were downwind, you could tell. The hat had done sterling service as a sick bag, so the full effect of the outfit was sadly lost to us.

The twins were immaculate. Cathy was fairly blasé about the whole thing. She told me later, as I was helping to sponge her down, that she felt privileged to have witnessed a rare phenomenon on her Highland trek.

The twins had not only lost their lunch in near perfect unison, they had also managed to chuck up just as Cath was driving on one of those rollercoaster roads for which the Highlands are particularly famed.

Just as the car had crested the brow of a particularly savage peak, both girls boaked. As the car then began it’s equally steep descent, it and the occupants then went into a sort of mini-freefall. It’s what causes that funny butterfly feeling you get in your tum when you drive these roads.

For a split second, Cath and the girls were in a sort of zero-gravity situation. So was the twin-loaded vomit comet.

Cathy said she watched it in the rear-view mirror, hovering in mid-air before gravity re-asserted control. Her hat took the hit for the team.

Speaking of sickness, thank you so much for the kind words since the news broke that cancer and I had a return bout lined up. One lovely person said I was exceptional. I’m not, not any more than any other cancer patient.

If in my case I was truly exceptional, I could have broken lockdown and driven to see my 81-year-old mother and sat down with her, told her face to face what was happening and given her a hug.

Had I judged these circumstances worthy of an exception to the current rules, I could have said, come home with me. Have a nice time with your grandson, it’s his 21st birthday. We’ll have some cake, your granddaughter will spoil you and any worries you have will be eased. I didn’t because, in my judgement, I decided my case was no more exceptional than the grandparents who do not get to cuddle the newest arrival, the families who don’t get to visit the sick in hospital or even the young folk who can’t get to just hang out with each other.

So, I told her over the phone.

The very least that man could have done was apologise to the people who protected the NHS by staying at home.