Perfect day

Jonah chipped his two front teeth – adult – bottom – in a pool accident that left him temporarily shocked into contrite pleasantness for a whole afternoon.

Despite this, the last days have to rate as some of the most perfect family days we’ve had for a long time. Finally rested, neck ache subsiding, we drove up the coast to investigate a beachside stables to fulfill a girlhood ambition of horseriding on the beach. Again the traffic was heavy, and when we arrived, the stables were closed. Undeterred, we headed to a beach bar on  deserted stretch, promising to ring up later and get it booked for Ava and me later in the week; and then back to Moriani Plage, where we hired a pedalo with slide and headed out into the sea.

Both kids swimming fairly well, we bobbed about for half an hour, although a little cloud forced us back in early as Ava’s lips turned blue, before wandering over to Les Flots Abri to sample some of their hundred ice cream flavours (I opted for an autumnal mix of cassis and hazelnut, the first time in my life I’ve had a double scoop) By then, the sun was high and hot and we headed back to the apartment for a mozzarella and tomato salad – trying to shift the bulge from baguette and butter on the first two days. The pool followed, Jonah hurting himself swiftly afterwards, so he sat, painfully on my lap until the shock eased before going by himself to the apartment to recover, while Ava perfected her underwater swimming, looking exceptionally cute and geeky in her goggles.

I checked on the boy, who was politeness itself as I examined his teeth (probably not a dentist job), rubbed toothpaste onto the chipped ones and gave him a glass of milk,  returning poolside to finish off John Grisham’s The Activist, which I found in the apartment,

I purposefully didn’t bring much in the way of reading material as I tend, given half a chance to bury myself in books on holiday and ignore my children, devouring all Grisham’s 300 or so pages, intended, I suspect, for a teen audience, (big type) in a day and a half, having previously raced though Malcolm Gladwell’s rather more erudite but no less enjoyable Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants, which is a scientific and historical approach to the advantages of disadvantages, something I often write about rather more unscientifically on this blog. I’d also picked up, on a whim at the airport,  the recently slut shamed Bryony Gordon’s The Wrong Knickers, which I thought might be funny, but which I put down in disgust after the first chapter as an over-privileged whingefest –  the sort of book I probably would have written at 25 if I was in the exulted position of being a public school educated Telegraph columnist with journalist parents, who maintains a sort of ignorant shock that people have sex with one another when they get drunk. Luckily, I’m none of those things, and so you get to enjoy this claptrap for free.

Rounding off the day with a gratuitous meal back at Les Flots Abri near Moriani Plage, notable for being the locale’s best restaurant, Jonah slurped his way through yet another steak hache using only his back teeth; Ava finally imbibed some vitamins in a fruit salad, I ate king prawns hung, rather unnecessarily on skewers, and we all made ourselves sick on Chantilly cream with the biggest sundae the kids have ever laid eyes on. The service, however was perfunctory, with pas des temps for les banalités, staff having mastered the art of racing through 100 covers a night using one iPad and an army of chubby servers who looked as though they had eaten all 100 ice creams. We waddled home and passed out for yet another ten hours of recovery sleep, Tom voluntarily banished to the living room futon having woken me up snoring two days in a row.

Today, Jonah’s rock climbing skills came in handy as we headed to the Cascade d’Ucelluline for a swim under a waterfall following a short mountain trek. It was a treacherous climb down, first to where the water pooled in sunlit hollows, cool and clear on the timesmoothed rocks, and then up to where a natural pool forms under the clouds, and shadow of the hills looming overhead, cold but deep enough to dive and rinse ones hair, gasping, like the Timotea advert from my childhood. We warmed up at a little beach side piscine with a shallow end where Ava learned first to swim, then to somersault, headfirst into the water; followed by salad nicoise and more steak hache in an early supper at a deserted beach restaurant, where I collapsed face down, rose-ed up on a lounger to finish yet another book picked up at reception – Jodi Picoult’s The  Storyteller – which has to be among the more harrowing, chastening accounts of the holocaust I have ever read, mixing fact and fiction with best selling aplomb, as the sun slowly faded while the kids played on a swing, before returning to the apartment for a game of whist and an another early night.

At this rate, I stand half a chance of coming back human.