Holidays

Was it really over two years since we last went on holiday together? My, how the time flies when you're shackled to the hard reality of househusbandry and full-time employment.

We stayed in Dunkeld, where my folks live. It's a very lovely part of Perthshire, on the river Tay. For F, of course, this was a whole wealth of firsts. From flying to foreigners, gardens to gloaming - rather than attempt some kind of exhaustive, blow-by-blow retrospective, here is a short and disordered smattering of F's First Holiday in Scotland.

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V and I are understandably tense on the plane. Ryanair don't do comfort, F has never experienced ear popping, it will be horrible for everyone if she takes against it.

She babbles excitedly all the way through the airport, says 'nyyeeeow' when we take off and then sleeps through the landing. What a waste of six hours of high-quality parental stress.

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F gets to sleep in my old crib, one that Farfar made himself. It has a carved elephant and pig to watch you sleeping, and a side that flips down for easy baby access. When told this is where she'll be sleeping, F hurls her beloved bunny in, pats the mattress with both hands to assess bounciness and then chortles happily.

A few days later when she's cranky, I put F in for an afternoon nap. Much against her wishes - there's a five minute period of screaming, yelling and knocking noises as she tries to shake her way free. Then there's a short quiet pause followed by a loud clatter, a big thump and a long yell.

F has worked the latches and opened the side of the cot, it turns out, tipping herself out in the process. She's more shocked than hurt, much like V and me are. Good - now we can be anxious when she's asleep too. The cot gets turned with the flapping side against the wall and tied up with garden string for good measure.

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Up at Rumbling Bridge, F paddles her feet in a chilly Scottish river and learns to throw stones into deep pools, ploomp. It's a beautiful afternoon, sun slanting through the trees into the dark brown water, midges weaving about as I carry F over rocks and under boughs to the safest places to dunk her feet. Farfar and Farmor are there too, it's very peaceful and happy.

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Cousin S wants the green plastic golf club F has just dropped to be kept hidden. I ask why. "Actually, Uncle J," she says, "I just don't want her to play with it." I ask why again, but that's all the answer I'm getting right now.

Actually, S and F get on very well, sitting and mixing mud pies together in the garden or just running about on the lawn together. F is quite taken with her tall blond cousin, she follows behind copying her and giggling when acknowledged.

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Gardens aren't new to F. Having one on tap, so to speak, is. It's a popular move. First thing after breakfast, she goes to the back door and says "run run run run run" until you let her out and chase her round the lawn. Two weeks of this gives her newfound motor confidence, she's trying out tiptoeing and stamping for the first time before we leave. The latter not just in the context of tantrums, amazingly, just stamping her right foot only on the floor for fun.

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Old college friends N and J, with their families, come over for a day to catch up. Insofar as spending an afternoon giving children of various sizes and ages piggybacks all round Dunkeld is catching up. I think I exhanged a record of three sentences with N, one of which was 'great to see you, bye!'

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F takes V's chocolate ice cream cone off her, to add to her collection. She's just eaten the last bit of mine. Her own is half-eaten and half-molten, flowing in luxurious pools over her face, hands and table setting. Cafe customers on the tables round us are turning to look, because F is not quiet in her appreciation of a good thing. There's a few disapproving faces, fusty old Scots muttering about messy children. Stuff 'em. Anyone who begrudges someone loud enjoyment of a first chocolate ice cream cone needs a good dowsing in sticky gloop.

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There's a Medieval Festival at Dunfermline Abbey. With jousting! Once somebody's suggested it to me, I insist on making everyone go. Look, it wasn't my idea. If you don't want to spend a stickily hot afternoon being jostled by overweight re-enactors in jerkins, don't let me have wind of it in the first place, that's my advice.

I've never seen live jousting, despite having worked as a show knight at one of London's worst available medieval experiences. Sadly, this is rubbish, being more of a kid-friendly joust-themed knockabout, with somersaulting men-at-arms and exploding lances. F likes the horses for about five minutes, then we go and run around on lawns instead. Even I have to admit it's better.

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Farfar and I go for a walk up Birnam Hill. It's a hot day, close and almost thundery in the way that Scottish hills do so well. You walk up the steep hills as though ascending into a furnace, and reach seemingly endless seas of bright green bracken.

Farfar has a mission - somewhere in the neck-deep ferns are some mysterious stones marked with cup-and-ring shaped depressions. Nobody knows their origins. Stone age? Pictish? Yithian cult? A Ponaptic fragment? I know which I favour.

If nobody knows their origins, it's perhaps because the map isn't very clear on their location either. Wading about in the bracken with big brown shield bugs pinging off our faces is great fun, if rather fruitless. We don't find all the mystery rocks, just the cup-marked ones (no rings). But we do find great swathes of juicy bilberries, which we pick until our water bottle is filled. So fruitful in some ways, I suppose.

After that, we join the ladies in a local hotel Spa for an afternoon of swimming. F likes swimming. I swoosh her about while V goes for a massage and Farmor goes jogging. Healthy.

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As a treat, Farfar and Farmor buy F a ticket to see Peppa Pig's Big Splash, a live action puppet show in Perth. I sit in the foyer while V takes her in. I'm the only bloke in my age group present, although the place is packed out with mums and grandparents. This says something sad about the UK's approach to parenting, I think, but I'm too tired to think what. I'm also too glad not to be watching more Peppa Pig. F sits through both halves entranced, then we run round and round in circles on Perth's North Inch park for an hour. Which is how F approximates picnic behaviour.

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V and I take a day to ourselves and stay in a decently cheap hotel in Edinburgh for a night. While we potter round shops, take in a tour of the historical Mary King's Close, get rained on and drink gin, F eats her own weight in pasta with Farfar and Farmor and blithely ignores the absence of her fretting parents as usual.

This is the first day we've had to ourselves for what, a year? I forget. Too long. It's almost like a first date, although without the same level of half-wittedly tentative conversational gambits. Having your first child already weighing on our minds is quite enough to make us half-witted anyway. We spend a fair bit of time at the hotel that evening looking at baby pictures of F and cooing, because we miss her.

She looks taller when we get back. Even if that's technically true, it's still ridiculous.

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She sleeps through the takeoff on the way home. So do I - we were up at three to get to the airport, only to discover we'd set alarms on our Swedish phones and were actually up at two. Goddamn GMT.

F is clearly delighted to be home, even though she's had a fantastic time on holiday. And she has grown in the last two weeks, both in actual height (she can now reach the lightswitches to turn them both on and off), confidence and mastery of speech.

As is traditional with holidays, this one had an elastically long first week where everything stretched out ahead of us endlessly, then a frantic short second one where everything was suddenly over. And then we're home, everything back to routine normal.

Or as close to it as we get, at least. This is F's new favourite game she's developed out of nowhere, a game called Bake The Smurf. Cramming mummy and baby smurf head first into a cooker is normal. It must be. It's my baby playing it.

Smurfia Plath

Faustus Act 1 Sc 3.76

During the heights of the Cold War, a top US agent working behind Iron Curtain managed to get himself captured. The KGB agents who took him were determined to get their money's worth for the time and trouble spent bringing him in. He was taken to a euphemistically-named Debriefing Centre somewhere in the Urals and tortured extensively for months. His name (or code name, at any rate, the stuff I read wasn't entirely sure) was John G Franklin.

Franklin managed to resist his torture, somehow. Conventional methods (insofar as torture can ever be considered conventional) weren't going to do it. But the KGB didn't give up. Instead, they worked with what they knew of Franklin, or his working persona at least - that of a typical family business man. Using that, they devised a new approach.

They released him into a carefully monitered labyrinth, specially built under the Urals. It had no entrance or exit, just the appearance of such. Although there were places he could rest, feed or relieve himself, reaching them required significant feats of nearly-superhuman endurance. Constant white noise, undercut with sudden violent blasts of sound, was present in every chamber, along with harshly artificial overhead lighting.

Everywhere he looked, Franklin was presented with the reminders of freedom that he no longer enjoyed. Pictures of smiling, happy people in expensive clothes, eating and drinking impossibly luscious food. None of this was the masterstroke in the Russian plan, however. That was to harness explosives to Franklin's chest with thick and indestrucible webbing, explaining to him that entering the wrong room at the wrong time, or exposing the explosives to the 'wrong stimuli' would cause an instant and unpleasant death.

Unless, of course, he cooperated. Which he did after only two days.

It may not seem like a particularly remarkable form of torture to you now, in an age where waterboarding, sensory deprivation and so forth are more widely known. Which goes to show you how ahead of its time it was - the KGB's methods were so widely adopted and expanded upon that they're now universally acknowledged. The influences they've had on modern culture are far wider than previously accepted. Books, games, even architecture.

I myself have had firsthand experience of this. Only today, I went round Ullared's massive indoor retail outlet for seven straight hours with V in full-throated shopping frenzy mode and F in a pram.

If that place wasn't devised by insane torturers expressly trying to damage, if not entirely quash, the human spirit of any entering it, then I don't know insane torturers. An eternity of aisles crammed with a random assortment of things you think you might like but probably could be forced to admit you don't need, all at low low prices.   Queues for everything! Queues for food, queues for changing rooms, queues for loos. Queues to get into the queues! My blood runs cold even now on thinking on it! Ahahahahahahahaaa!

Franklin, if you ever existed beyond a pointlessly long run-up to this venting of anguish after a long, long day, then my hat would be off to you. I called the KGB about six hours ago and offered to tell them everything. They were very politely confused in their rejection of my offer, but I think they're just being coy. I shall call them back now and try again.