Half term comes round again, like the tolling of a graveyard bell. From the Midlands and the South, bowed and cowed, the hopeful parent horde crawls west in hatchbacks and people carriers, in search of a glimpse of the normality they enjoyed before they gave birth, in search a great gleaming myth. It flickers at the horizon of consciousness, where sun, sea, and sand meet in a landscape made of ashes and memories. It is the child-friendly hotel. And it does not really exist.

The child friendly hotel has a ball pool and a soft play area, where impotent dads sit at the fringes of the action and show each other pointless apps on their i-pads, a primitive territorial display disguised as something sophisticated by virtue of its use of stylised technology; the child friendly hotel has a children’s dining room, where really rather nice children’s meals are served from a counter, but the smarter kids know they’re being patronized and won’t play ball.

The child friendly hotel has an hour long overlap between six and seven, when the bar briefly opens out into the communal area, where really rather good wild animal displays by trained handlers keep the kids quiet, and you can do two pints minimum of 5% local brew with some other balding sexless loser, before putting the infants to bed, except you can’t even have a decent argument about football scores or chart positions or history with anyone any more because all the other dads have got fact-checking apps on their i-phones and all speculative small talk is instantly closed down by their annoying access to accuracy.

The child friendly hotel has enticing evening menus, fine dining style dinners, inexactly approximated en masse, but entirely adequate all the same; a collective memory of something you all might have eaten at leisure before the kids came, steamed this and pan fried that and wine to go with it. But what to do with the children, who can’t come in, as they will flick fennel around and fight?

There’s a listening service, and reception will contact you if there’s a stirring sound upstairs, and mums and dads snatch a few moments over a table crowned with a glowing pager, like the Bat Signal, calling Bruce Wayne away from dinner with the glamorous Selina Kyle.
But all the nervous parents know there’s no-one on the hotel front door, and anybody could get up stairs, knock at your room, claim to be a friend of mum and dad, and make off with your kids, but these frazzled breeders just want two hours alone, and prop up the bar convincing each other it’s all perfectly safe. Meanwhile, upstairs, their sleeping kids are shelf-stacked in their beds, saleable items in a bogeyman’s all night supermarket dreamscape.

You imagine, fondly, that you are an individual. But the child-friendly hotel tells you you are nothing, one of millions of toddler-parents, sleepwalking identically in mass formation towards the teenage years, when your offspring will no longer require moment to moment supervision, and will go away instead and try to get served in rural pubs, whilst despising you and everything you stand for.

But then one day, the cloud lifts, and it stops raining, and the beautiful kids are playing on a sandy beach, dabbling in the rock pools, digging sandcastles, and pointing excitedly at troop carrier aircraft bringing back surviving afghan war servicemen to some remote moorland military installation. It’s like your own memory of a holiday, in the seventies, when there were still butterflies and wild birds and morris dancers and mackrel. And you’ve got half a buzz from half a pint of Doom Bar at lunchtime, and someone else is cooking dinner, and your wife looks pretty good in a kagoul, and it doesn’t seem so bad.

And by day six you’ve hit a rhythm and the ball pool and the dinners make it all seem somehow do-able after all, but then it’s time to go. And on the way back the boy says he’s glad to be going home, because that’s where his toys and his friends are. And next school holidays, can we please just stay there, and not at the child-friendly hotel.

Stewart Lee Is currently on tour with his new show Carpet Remnant World www.stewartlee.co.uk