LAST summer we were all locked down in our houses. This summer we're allowed out, but with hands, face, space positively seared into our brains at this stage, we're not going too far.
I always worry that I haven't made exceptional summer holiday memories for our kids - that they will grow up just remembering dank and rainy days stuck in the house in Derry and will tell a therapist that their childhood was utterly miserable.
Because of this I overplan and overthink and set expectations far too high. I imagine beautiful days out in castles and picnics in glades and trips to museums where everyone is totally enthralled by the stuff we have paid £30 each to gaze upon.
So when everyone gets fed up after three hours of my plans, I throw the head up and chuck the itinerary dramatically in the bin.
Previous summers were spent going mad without wifi in a remote (haunted) log cabin in the Wicklow mountains and with teenagers having the huffs because there was no McDonald's in the glorious wilds of Glendalough.
We've done Dublin, Belfast, Down, Mayo and Sligo. We've done Orlando, which is more or less Sligo with sun.
We've done Donegal where we have seen, at this stage, every inch, every leaf, every blade of grass, every grain of sand that the county has to offer. But that's where we'll end up this year again.
And as is traditional, I will make an itinerary and half the people will say they think it's brilliant and half will say they don't want to do any of it because it's boring and there will be a heated, colourful and loud debate where anyone standing in the vicinity of our car will fear they are in danger of being sucked into a chaotic abyss as we all argue loudly about whose idea this stupid holiday actually was.
When we were kids, we spent every single summer in Ireland, in dusty B&Bs and caravans that might well have been condemned if health and safety had been invented back then.
Our summer holidays always started in August, after my History teacher father had marked all his exam papers and emerged, blinking in the sunlight, from his room.
I'm sure the last thing he wanted to do at that moment was to drive off into rural Ireland for a camping holiday with two surly teenagers, two youngsters who asked every two minutes how many more miles it was until we got there. But we went anyway.
And we would sit at the border checkpoint for an hour in sweltering heat, melting into the back seats as the army searched cars. My poor father would have to take all the cases and bikes and soggy sandwich bags and buckets and spades out of the boot for the soldiers as the teenagers argued in the back seat about not wanting to go on stupid holiday in the first place.
When we would arrive at the campsite, he would be the man out in torrential rain, setting up our canvas abode, or trying to work out how to switch the electricity on in a holiday home so my mother could have a cup of tea, or inspecting bedrooms for spiders so his youngest would sleep easy there.
I don't really remember all the good stuff we did on holiday. I remember spraining my ankle in Galway and my Dad spending six hours in casualty with me, I remember his old Cortina breaking down up a mountain in the middle of nowhere and us all out in the pouring rain pushing it to a hill start.
I remember being on a choppy ferry crossing and a man puked over the side and the wind caught it and blew it into my father's face.
Those are probably not the memories my parents were going for, but they are memories nonetheless and they make me laugh, even after all these years.
When I ask my kids what they remember about our holidays they say the strangest things too. The bag of sour joke sweets we bought in a little corner shop in Bray that made one of them puke in the car, the doctor's surgery in Orlando that we had to pay £350 for antibiotics for an ear infection, barbecue nights, a dog that used to howl in the morning like a rooster, jumping down sand dunes, Daddy the city slicker being sick after a farmer showed him a robot whose job it was to clean up cow excrement. We could have taken them anywhere.
I hope wherever you go this year, if you go anywhere, you will make good memories.
