A Shed in France

The Dutch are completely obsessed with holidays.

Nederlanders often head off to the slopes in Austria for a spot of skiing in the winter, squeeze in a nice European city break in the spring, followed by a hardcore car journey in the summer to a campsite somewhere in deepest France.

They take their holidays very seriously here.  It’s the first thing people will enquire about after being introduced to you.  

The British are obsessed with the weather while the Dutch discuss holidays.

And if you don’t have at least one holiday planned, the locals will think you’re very odd and give you the cold shoulder.

But how on earth can they afford all these holidays?

Well, the month of May brings that wonderful Dutch institution: vakantiegeld (Holiday money). 

Basically, millions of Dutch workers suddenly get a welcome lump of extra cash just as the holiday season approaches.

Brilliant.

Except it’s not quite the free holiday bonus it initially sounds like. It’s an employment entitlement you’ve been building up all year.

It never feels quite as generous once you remember you’ve been earning it all year.

It’s a sigaar uit eigen doos, as the Dutch would say - a cigar from your own box.

Regardless, by July, once the schools have broken up for the summer, half the country is deserted as the great exodus begins.

Last year, we joined a seemingly endless procession of Volvos, packed with half the contents of the house, heaps of bicycles and overexcited children.  All heading south and clogging up the motorways through Belgium and into France.

What a trip.

Never again.  

We paid thousands of euros to drive a thousand arduous, dusty kilometres to the south-west of France with three restless kids bouncing around the back of an insanely overloaded car.  

Sitting in that car was rather like being trapped in one of those hoarding programmes where the occupants last saw their bathroom three years ago and now have to leave the house through the letterbox.

The journey took the best part of two days during which, in our darkest moments, we started questioning our parenting skills, our life choices and occasionally our marriage.

But we made it.

After what felt like driving across Australia and back, we arrived at some beaten-up old French campsite that looked like it had last seen a lick of paint around 1974.

But seeing where we were going to be staying, our hearts sank. We quickly realised that the accommodation pictures on the website were somewhere between wildly optimistic and downright fraudulent.

We had essentially paid a small fortune to spend ten days living in a sweltering, cramped shed built seemingly for a family of hamsters.

It was like living in a tiny tropical pinball machine where we proceeded to bounce off the walls, furniture and each other for ten straight days.

I’ve still got the scars to prove it.

Half of the Netherlands had, of course, joined us at the campsite. We all could have just set up camp in the street back home and it wouldn’t have been much different.  

And considerably cheaper.

After half a day unpacking the car, we settled into some sort of holiday routine which mainly consisted of daily battles with the air-con unit, outwitting bloodthirsty mosquitoes and trying to use the fiendishly difficult French barbecue without setting fire to the neighbour’s Volvo.

For the first few days, I tried to think of a good reason why having a beer at 10am was justified.

By Wednesday, I’d stopped looking for one.

By Thursday, I started obsessively wondering what exactly we’d paid all this money for.

Back home, we had beds which didn’t render you a cripple after one night, a kitchen where you didn’t have to try to chop an onion with a plastic knife and a cooker where you didn’t bash your head on the extractor fan ten times.  There was also enough space to walk from one side of the room to another without repeatedly cracking your shin open on the coffee table.

But thankfully, by the start of the second week, just as I was seriously considering sleeping in the car or checking into a hotel, I found myself, miraculously slowly getting used to it.  

Maybe I had developed Stockholm syndrome.

I could finally put up with the lukewarm shower so small that I had to breathe-in to close the door.

I could endure the WiFi endlessly dipping in and out during an exciting episode of Peppa Pig.

I could cope with hand-washing my pants and socks in the sink.

I could almost swallow having to pay double prices for essentials in the local campsite shop.  

Actually, no I couldn’t.

Bloody criminals.

But it didn’t last.

As we approached the end of the holiday, and after another sleepless night spent coping with the heat, a restless wife and a mattress apparently made from reinforced concrete, I found myself longing for home.

My own bed.

My own shower.

My own kitchen.

Even a Monday morning school run started to seem strangely appealing.  

Yes, I realised right there on that campsite in France that I was missing home.  

But not England.  

The Netherlands.

Finally, after seven years of whining about the place, maybe I was ready to call it home.

Or maybe, with clarity, it was just that anywhere was better than this overheated French pressure cooker.

Isn’t there something fundamentally odd about holidays? We spend fifty weeks of the year making our homes as comfortable as possible, then hand over thousands of euros for the privilege of living somewhere considerably worse for two weeks.

And then we come home telling everyone that we had a great time.

By the time the holiday was over, I was battered, bitten and sunburnt, €4,000 poorer and 1,000 kilometres from home.

But at least the kids had a great time.  

That’s what really mattered.

As we were nearing the end of the holiday, the Dutch family next door cheerfully came to say hello and asked where we were going on our next holiday.

We hadn’t even left France yet and we were already being asked about our next holiday.

I smiled politely.  And thought of my nice soft bed.

“Er, we’re not sure yet.  Maybe we’ll just stay at home.”

The neighbours fixed me with a strange mixture of both pity and incomprehension and walked back inside their house without another word.

They never spoke to us again.