London - Their faces are freckled, their tangled hair hasn’t been brushed or washed for days and their bare feet are as dirty as they could ever be.
A rare wave of spontaneous happiness washes over me while I watch my four children sleeping in the back of the car as we drive home to London from our Cornish holiday.
Sometimes the ordinariness of life is the best thing about it, the thing that gives you the most unexpected joy.
This has been the most unexciting of family breaks, but somehow that has made it one of our best. I can hear the two-and-a-half-year-old Mabel snoring loudly in her car seat, her cheeks flushed with tiredness.
It’s the most unflattering angle from which to observe her as the tilt of the seat gives her four chins. My eldest, 11, has headphones on and her hoodie up. The other two, aged ten and seven, are draped over each other, their heads touching, the younger one clutching a Spar carrier bag, prone as he is to car sickness.
Apart from the occasional whiff of the dog’s death breath from the back, everything is pleasantly peaceful.
Delicious memories of sunny, sandy days filled with rounders on the beach, ice creams sat on the seawall, fish and chips behind a poorly erected windbreak and games of Mousetrap hang in the air as the miles rush past.
We go to the same beach for all our school holidays and do the same predictable things. Family rules are relaxed: stolen custard creams for breakfast are overlooked, teeth-brushing is a less than twice daily occurrence and bedtime is elastic.
Apart from mild sibling rivalries, there is little tension among the troops while we are away.
I limit visits to the ridiculously over-priced Shell shop, but anything else goes.
The children make repeated trips to the beach cafe, exploring their ever- increasing independence. I notice the cafe has a new sign: “Unattended children will be given espresso and a free kitten.”
I spend at least 30 minutes a day wrestling the smallest child in and out of her damp wetsuit in the public loos and I nearly forget to apply suntan lotion to one of our pale children during the daily chaos of leaving the rental cottage.
We eat cream teas at the local bee centre and pretend to like Cornish pasties.
It doesn’t matter that the toddler is up at dawn here because the days glide by coated in the warm fog of easy holiday harmony.
Everything is so normal that I worry my children will feel left out when school mates talk of trips on planes and they will demand an expensive adventure to post on Facebook.
But it’s been more than a decade of the same place and they seem content.
Besides, I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to watch their tiny bare feet tread the same footpaths my sister and I trod as children.
If you had told my teenage self I’d be back again and again with my family to the area I grew up in, I would have laughed in your face, given how I hotfooted it out of Cornwall to work in London just a month after I turned 16.
So little and so much has changed. I can remember this car journey from my childhood, travelling up to London to visit my grandparents.
My younger sister and I shared the back seat of a pale blue Mini. No radio. No seatbelts. Barney our huge Afghan/labrador cross sat between us.
Perhaps there is much to be said for this reassuring feeling of just being content, that a life peppered with the constant search for something “better” is oddly unfulfilling.
I hope we can hold on to the comforting normalness of our stay-cations as teenage-dom approaches my family.
Mabel breaks the spell of the journey’s peace when she wakes. “My feet are magic,” she says. Well, almost normal. - Daily Mail
* Lorraine Candy is editor-in-chief of Elle.