The joys and pitfalls of packing your partner and kids off on holiday – and staying home alone

How many readers, I wonder, will be chained to their desks for all or part of this half-term while the rest of the family unwind on holiday? And if so, will you be receiving regular updates so that you know what you’re missing?

That “ping-ping” signalling a cascade of WhatsApp messages, pictures and mini-videos (yes, I’ll look at them all later, I promise!) showing your wife, husband or partner plus children dropping ice creams in the sand, wrestling with a rain-sodden tent or perhaps striding out in their cagoules.

Most of my summer was like that. After a relaxing two weeks in the sun, I came back to work. My wife, meanwhile, works in a school, so she has the whole holiday off, and she planned ingenious further expeditions not only for our children, but also at various times for their cousins too.

After all, why should they all be forced to stay at home climbing up the walls just because their dad can’t take any more holiday? And besides, there is the pleasure of shuffling the family pack so that a particular child (or children) gets to spend exclusive time with one parent.

This time Katherine took our youngest daughter and her cousin camping on a farm on the stunningly beautiful west coast of Scotland, while their older siblings plus cousins stayed at the adjoining Tighnabruaich sailing school, where they were expertly instructed according to the Royal Yacht Association syllabus in Laser Picos.

The waters of the Kyles of Bute are sheltered and coastal, but there’s still plenty of wind and waves to make it exciting. No matter that it rained most days: the photos that I flicked through on my phone showed the children looking bedraggled in their wetsuits, but happy.

For the younger ones, Katherine single-handedly put up an enormous canvas “bell” tent, complete with a multi-coloured carpet and a sort of porch attachment to keep off the rain. The girls took a rubber dinghy out near the shore, and went mackerel fishing with a local boatman: “Caught three mack, one codling and one whiting.” Then, ping-ping-ping, came the pics, showing the fishing and the gleaming silvery catch.

From my end of the operation, I found that the novelty of being on my own soon wore off. The house seemed unnaturally quiet and I switched on Radio 4 as soon as I got home in the evenings. Since I hadn’t bothered to arrange any cinema trips or meetings with friends, I’d watch box sets or read. In fact, I relished being alone and realised how much of the evening is normally taken up with pushing, cajoling and badgering the children through homework, baths, brushing teeth and bed.

In idle moments I imagined myself as Tom Ewell in the 1955 comedy The Seven Year Itch, packing his wife and son off to Maine – complete with kayak – while he swelters in New York and becomes entangled with Marilyn Monroe, the actress from the apartment upstairs who keeps her underwear cool in the fridge.

Or, darker and more intriguing, there’s Edward G Robinson, the bespectacled professor left at home on his own in Fritz Lang’s terrifying film noir The Woman in the Window (1944). He is caught up in murder and a swirling vortex of paranoia involving the lethally alluring Joan Bennett, that “woman in the window”.

First, though, there’s the necessary wholesome scene at Grand Central Terminal, where we see Robinson’s cuddly scholar saying goodbye to his little boy and girl, in cap and bonnet, and sensible wife.

“Will you miss me?” she asks.

“Every minute of the day, every second of the night.”

And he kisses the children goodbye with a, “Goodbye you little brats!” and, “Mind mother, both of you!”

The language we use today might have changed, but the sentiments are the same. Except now the phone will bleep within seconds of the train departing, because the temptation is to share a digital version of every experience. But I wonder – does it diminish the liberating sense of “getting away”?

At least with the ever-present monitoring of the mobile phone and its global satellite positioning systems, the spouse who’s left behind is unlikely to fall to pieces as spectacularly as Tom Ewell or Edward G Robinson.