Matt Rudd - William’s Progress

‘Right. And the no?’

‘No, because bringing a flask on a car journey is the beginning of the end. Only middle-aged people do that. Have you got some travel sweets in the glove box, too? Oh my God, you have. I rest my case.’

‘I hate to tell you this, but you’re already middle-aged, sweetheart. You planned the route three days ago.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘You did. You phoned Johnson and had a conversation with him about it. Only middle-aged people can spend more than twenty minutes discussing whether the M4/M5 is quicker than the A303.’

‘Well, Johnson was talking rubbish. Everyone knows the M4/M5 is best if there aren’t roadworks.’

‘I love it.’

‘Love what?’

‘Being middle-aged.’

‘Really?’ For a minute, I’d thought she was having me on, but she wasn’t.

‘Yes. We’re settling. We know what we’re doing. We know where we’re going.’

‘Do we?’

‘Yes. Apart from this whole parenting thing…which I think we’re doing all right at, don’t you?’

‘Well, you are. You’ve been brilliant.’

‘You’re doing all right as well. I think we make quite a good middle-aged couple, all things considered. And here we are, going on a lovely holiday as a family with our beautiful sleeping boy.’

She paused, smiling, and looked out the window. I smiled, too, because perhaps everything was going pretty well. And there was no denying it: we were going on holiday. A family holiday. It might even be fun.

Except then Jacob woke up and needed a feed. The fourteen miles to the next service station were the longest fourteen miles of my life. It’s bad enough listening to babies crying in general, but when it’s your baby, it has an extra piercing quality. It cuts straight into the very centre of your brain. It is almost impossible to do anything but deal with that noise. This is very clever: Mother Nature’s way of ensuring the offspring isn’t left abandoned in its hour of need. Except Mother Nature didn’t take into account the fact that we were going on holiday to Devon in the driving rain of bleak midwinter with a seven-week-old child. And that I might need to be able to concentrate on driving.

…and breathe.

Step four:you must be able to drive a car at high speed in the rain while a child is screaming and the petrol gauge is on empty and your wife is saying, ‘Hurry, he needs changing and it’s still ten miles to the next service station,’ and you know he needs changing and you know it’s still ten miles to the next service station and, oh Christ, there’s a police car and, oh Christ, he wants me to pull over and, oh Christ, should I keep going because it’s now only five miles to the service station and he can give me the ticket there.

I pull over. Isabel climbs into the back to feed Jacob while I face an interrogation.

‘Good afternoon, officer. Can I start by saying how sor—’

‘Do you know what the national speed limit is, sir?’

‘Seventy miles an hour, officer. But this is our first-ever—’

‘And are you aware of how fast you were travelling?’

‘Too fast, officer. But you see Jacob was—’

‘Ninety-eight miles an hour,’ he interrupts again, peering into the back of the car at Isabel, who is trying to change Jacob.

‘Seriously? Oh God. I’m sorry. We’re new to this whole parenting—’

‘How old is your child?’ he interrupts for a fourth time and I begin to wonder whether the police computer is connected in any way to the health-visitor computer because we’re bound to be flagged on the latter so a flag on the former might constitute two flags on aggregate and I wonder how many flags you’re allowed before they take your child away. Probably no more than three.

‘Seven weeks,’ says Isabel. ‘And I don’t think we’re going to be doing any more long journeys for a while.’

The policeman hesitates and shakes his head. ‘Tell me about it. Mine’s three months old and we still can’t make it beyond the M25.’

‘If you arrested me and carted me off to prison, I would be grateful,’ I say, in an attempt to build on our shared pain. ‘Anything to escape the nappies.’

‘I’d love to, but I can’t,’ he replies. He is no longer a police officer. I am no longer a felon. We are new dads together, trying to make the best of a crazy world, a world of tears and stress and sleep deprivation and a necessity, every now and again, to drive at ninety-eight miles an hour.

‘I can only issue a ticket.’

‘But—’

‘If you pay in the next fourteen days, you won’t need to appear in court, but you will get three points on your licence and this will affect your insurance premiums. Another two miles an hour and you’d have got a ban.’

‘But I thought you were—’

‘There’s no excuse for driving so fast on a motorway. You’ll get yourself killed. And your little kiddie there, too. And perhaps someone else’s kiddie. Like mine.’

Unbelievable. He knows about the piercing scream that cuts straight to the very core of your brain but because he’s a copper with an annoying high-vis jacket and a Taser and a hat, he thinks he’s above the laws of parenting.

‘But he is right, darling. You shouldn’t really be driving so fast,’ says Isabel, astonishingly, as we pull away, but I know better than to try to argue. She’s tired. I’m tired. We must get through it. I shall content myself with muttering all the way to Devon.

Why would anyone pay good money to stay in a house that is more rubbish than their own? Because it looked nice in the picture? Because they automatically but inexplicably drop their standards while they’re on holiday? Because holidays are supposed to be rubbish? And because if they weren’t, it would be unbearable to go home at the end of them?

The cottage is what an estate agent might call rustic but what I might call uninhabitable. The drive and garden are submerged in five centimetres of what an estate agent might call locally sourced, organic yard cover but what I might call mud. The puddle by the front door into which I drop the seventh bag, the one containing all Jacob’s baby clothes, is a metre deep, although no one could have foreseen that until a bag had been dropped in it. An estate agent might call it a well-appointed plunge pool.

The heating system is what an estate agent might call an original fixture, the logs for the fire are what the lying bastard might call slightly damp. The oven has the remains of someone else’s pizza in it. The microwave doesn’t exist. There are many beds scattered around the top floor, but none of them are comfortable. The windows open, but they don’t shut. The bath has a pink and brown shower curtain slouching bacterially over it. The pink is its original colour, the brown a modification over years. Or vice versa.

If we put the quarter-kilowatt electric shower on at the same time as the kettle, the television, the radio or the baby-listening monitor, we have a power cut. To re-trip the switch, I have to walk across the swamp to a shed in which the mains electrics are housed.

The television, in direct contrast to every other television in the land, only gets Channel Five.

Unfortunately, the farmer is very friendly. He describes himself as an artisan. He grows not enough pigs and not enough cows and sells them to people like Isabel at posh farmer’s markets at vastly inflated prices. And people like Isabel can’t help feeling sorry for him, this last protector of the land, even though he’s conned us out of £400 for an outbuilding on a farm he is clearly struggling to keep going.

I refuse to feel sorry for him. He could always stop being a farmer and condemn himself to a life of office radiation and zombie commuting like the rest of us. He could be an accountant. Isabel claims that, without him, a way of life will be lost for ever. And the bumblebees and barn owls would go with it. We must use this week to live the good life…conversation round a candle, reading a book, playing backgammon, listening to the drip-drip-drip of the leaking roof.