A survey published today found that British parents will spend almost £50 per child on ice creams during the summer holidays(!)
The average cone now costs £2.65, while some parents are paying as much as £4. Apparently, a quarter have resorted to telling their children that the ice cream van has run out rather than admit that they simply don’t want to pay another twelve quid for three rapidly melting Mr Whippys.
But one part of the survey interested me more than the prices. Nearly four in ten parents said they felt under pressure to give their children a memorable summer.
I think we sometimes confuse “memorable” with “expensive”. We fill the holidays with paid activities, restaurant meals, attractions, treats and carefully planned days out because we want our children, and grandchildren, to look back and think they had a wonderful time.
Yet the moments that survive are rarely the ones we bought.
They remember all the cousins sleeping under the same roof. The fiercely contested game in the garden. The enormous breakfast when everyone appeared in their pyjamas. The evening when the adults stayed around the table talking long after dinner had finished, while the children disappeared to invent a world of their own somewhere else in the house.
They may even remember the ice cream. But probably because Grandad dropped his, the dog ate it and everyone laughed, not because it cost £4.
That is what our houses are really for. They give families and friends the space to gather properly: big kitchens, long dining tables, gardens, games rooms, hot tubs and enough bedrooms that nobody has to drive home just as the evening becomes interesting.
You don’t need to organise every hour. In fact, the house often does most of the work. People cook, wander, talk, play, disappear for a nap and gradually settle into the sort of unhurried time together that everyday life rarely allows.
We have beautiful large houses around the UK for groups of all sizes, from family weekends and milestone birthdays to reunions and celebrations that have been talked about for years but never quite arranged.
Because the most memorable part of summer probably won’t be the thing you bought for £4.
It will be having everyone there when it happened.
See all our houses here.
Thanks,
Neil Atkinson
Luxury Group Stay
PS. You contact us with your group size and dates and we will start looking for you.
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