Serve us quickly and serve us well. That means Wi-Fi not crayons and no chicken nuggets. And we definitely don’t want balloons on long, pointy sticks
We are now well into the final run of the annual six-week endurance test that is the school summer holidays – standing on Lego in our bare feet, bankrupting ourselves to pay for holiday clubs and staring out of the window at the rain-sodden garden. We’ve been eating out a lot as a family: it is meant as a method of escape, but, as any parent knows, it can be a fraught affair. You go to the restaurants you enjoy visiting with your friends, thinking your children will slot seamlessly into a normal dining situation. Which is a mistake. A big mistake.
I took my five-year-old daughter to a smart Italian restaurant, where I envisaged a leisurely father-daughter lunch, full of chat and laughter. In reality, she (admirably) scoffed a bucket of mussels in about 15 minutes and then slid into a distant state of ennui, from which she surfaced only to ask why the man at the next table had a bald head and whether, if she sicked mussels all over the floor, they would still be whole.
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