Michael Deacon: I took my four-year-old to Cyprus and all he wanted was to play indoors
No one who has a small child is ever truly on holiday. Parenthood is a job with no time off. You can go to the beach but you won’t be sunbathing – you’ll be digging a tunnel to Australia while your child stands over you, barking orders like a foreman (“Deeper! Deeper! Keep digging, Dada!”).
You can go to the pool but you won’t be lazing on a lounger with a Lee Child novel – you’ll be too busy trying to prevent your child from drowning (or trying to prevent him from drowning you).
There’s no relaxing, no recharging, no letting your mind unwind as the hours drift dreamily by. Looking after a small child is hard work. It demands an Olympian’s reserves of energy, stamina and focus. As the end of each family holiday nears, I’m already looking forward to getting back into the office for a well-earned break.
It’s still possible to have a good time, of course. But there are certain criteria on which my wife and I insist. Wherever we’re going, we don’t want to cook, shop, tidy or drive. We want everything to be arranged for us and within easy reach: meals, drinks, activities, entertainment.
We want to do as little possible. We’ll have our hands full as it is, attempting to stop our four-year-old son from: a) having a public meltdown every time we apply his sun cream; and b) noisily replacing the lyrics of every nursery rhyme in the English canon with the word “bum”.
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Villas, then, are out. We go to resorts. Resorts full of parents who are in exactly the same position, and so can’t look down their noses at us. Normally we book with Sensatori (the chain of family-friendly resorts dotted around the Mediterranean). But this year we thought we’d try something a little bit classier. The Four Seasons: a recently refurbished five-star hotel in Limassol, Cyprus.
Curiously enough, this Four Seasons isn’t part of the Four Seasons hotel chain. It just happens to have the same name. Frankly, it’s a pretty odd name for a hotel in Cyprus to have, given that Cyprus is warm the whole year round. A more accurate name would be The One Season Plus a Couple of Days’ Rain Over Christmas.
The hotel itself is airily immaculate, all glass and marble and polish. Given how dry and dusty Limassol is, the grounds are remarkably lush. Every balcony has a colonel’s moustache of greenery drooping from it. Bright flowers – in particular bougainvillea and callistemon – run riot. Fat palms wave drowsily. Even the revolving door of the main restaurant is stuffed with bamboo shoots.
Not that we had much time for standing around and admiring the view. We had a child to occupy. The easy option was the family pool, with its inbuilt jacuzzis, slide and miniature neighbouring toddler pool – complete with fish-shaped pump-action water cannon, ideal for the drenching of dozing parents.
A lot of families seemed to spend most of their week around the pool, which was perfectly understandable: thanks to a combination of the heat and the poolside cocktail bar, it’s easy to flop into a sun-sated torpor.
That’s great for those whose children will actually permit them to relax and enjoy it – rather than, say, demanding another ice cream every 25 minutes and scampering perilously close to the edge of the pool with a shred of white napkin stuck to their chin while shouting: “I’m a billy goat! I’M A BILLY GOAT!”
Thankfully for us, there were alternatives. First, the beach. The Four Seasons had its very own. The sand may have been a drab grey (it was formed from volcanic rock) but the sea was beautiful.
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The water was as clear as a pane of glass – and beneath it, nothing but firm, ribbed sand. No rubbish, hardly any stones or shells, practically no seaweed. It was about as spotless as a beach could be. The temperature was just right, too. Lovingly warm. In the glittering distance, the heads of swimmers bobbed like buoys.
Stationed along the beach were sun loungers shaded by straw parasols. On a little table beside each one was a call button, for summoning the cocktail waiter. Every order was accompanied by an unsolicited bowl of crisps. Which is nice – if you are a fast eater. Seconds after the bowl was placed on my table, the crisps were snatched, one by one and in rapid succession, by the fearless local birds. Swoop-swoop-swoop.
Nearby was a sign advertising water sports. You could go windsurfing, paragliding, jet skiing, kayaking. The only option that looked suitable for a four-year-old, though, was the pedal boat, so we paid €20 (￡17.50) and clambered aboard. My wife and I enjoyed it but I sensed that our son wasn’t quite so keen. It was something about the way he spent the entire half-hour bleating “I want to go baaaaack”, even though we were never more than 30 yards from the shore.
If you, too, are lumbered with a landlubber, don’t worry. For children aged 7-13 the Four Seasons has a kids’ club and, for those our son’s age, both a soft play area and a kindergarten, which was open throughout the day – and offered entertainment every evening, as well. Our son loved the kindergarten. I know, typical – you fly your child to a Mediterranean beach and all he wants to do is play indoors.
It was good, though. The staff were lovely. We liked the entertainment, too. Sometimes they just showed a film but on two of the evenings there was a magician and our son was delirious with the thrill of it. The rabbits, the doves, the levitating tables, the terrible jokes: he was positively wriggling with joy.
I enjoyed the tricks, too, but mainly I enjoyed watching my son enjoy them. He was laughing in that special way only very small children do: all bubbly and squeaky and silly, as if they’re being tickled by both Mummy and Daddy at the same time. Another evening there was a kindergarten disco. Our son point-blank refused to dance. The rest of the children did, though – including one little girl on crutches.
From our point of view, the best thing about the kindergarten was that each day it allowed us to get out and have fun by ourselves for an hour or so (I hope that doesn’t make it sound as if we were trying to get rid of our son. It was more the other way round. He was practically shooing us out of the door).
Anyway, it gave us some time to sunbathe and visit the gym and have a massage at the hotel spa – and also to have a go at another boat ride. This time we chose the “mushroom”. If, like me, you’ve never heard of a “mushroom” before: imagine driving a motorised sofa. A floating motorised sofa. We pootled back and forth across the gorgeous water, untroubled by a single blurt of infant protest.
Another advantage of a holiday like this: the food. The main restaurant (the Café Tropical) was run as an enormous buffet, serving all manner of different cuisines at every meal. The quality was very good but the memory that sticks with me most is the fruit: so much better than you’d find in any British shop.
In Cyprus the roads are lined with orange trees and the taste of a truly fresh orange is a revelation: each segment bursts in your mouth, like a tiny grenade of juice. The puddings were great, too. After dinner every night, our son would totter out of the restaurant sporting a David Brent goatee of chocolate.
The other good thing about a big buffet restaurant is that it provides the perfect chance to peer at the other guests. It’s all right, you’re wearing sunglasses; they can’t tell. Such a range of people you get in a place like this. All well-off, obviously, otherwise they wouldn’t be here, but even so, there’s still a range. Impossibly grand middle-aged mums, made-up to the nines even for breakfast.
Elderly men, attempting to project as much dignity as they can muster while wearing socks with sandals. Bull-necked Tony Soprano lookalikes, with sun-roasted knees peeping from shorts. Small children, immobilised by iPads.
As is the case in Cyprus as a whole, the Four Seasons attracts more guests from Britain than from any other country. It also gets a lot of Russians and Israelis. You can identify the British just by a glance: they’re the ones who look least at ease in the heat. Seeing a middle-aged, middle-class British man in a T-shirt is like seeing a tortoise without its shell.
The other restaurants probably suited the British better, because you had to dress a little more smartly for those. There was a lovely Mediterranean restaurant, the Vivaldi; an upmarket Chinese, the Seasons Oriental; and the Colors Café, which dealt in what I can only describe as pudding porn. Obscenely, graphically, scandalously showy puddings.
It would have been easy to spend our whole week in the Four Seasons’ grounds. That’s generally how it goes when we stay at a Sensatori resort: all we need to entertain and feed a small child is concentrated in one place, so, rather embarrassingly, we scarcely get a glimpse of the actual country we’ve flown all this way to see. We did see the sights of Limassol, though: visiting Limassol Castle, where Richard Lionheart is said to have married Berengaria of Navarre; noting how, to attract tourists, many of the shops have English rather than Cypriot names (including a fashion boutique called “Fancy Shop”); and buying a bottle of the local spirit, Zivania, whose name translates as “fire water”. It tasted like a very angry cough sweet.
We liked the Four Seasons. Although busy, it was also largely peaceful. The light summery music fluttering through the restaurants and bars. The koi carp, gliding through the water beside the Café Tropical. The innumerable cats, yawning by the beach, wholly unfazed by the presence of people. No one was ever in a hurry, apart from the crisp-snatching birds.
And, most importantly, our son enjoyed himself – which meant we could enjoy ourselves, too. In fact, there were moments, here and there, when I actually came very close to relaxing. And, in all sincerity, that is the highest compliment the parent of a small child can pay to a hotel.
Michael Deacon is the political sketch writer for The Telegraph
The essentials
A week at the Four Seasons, Limassol, with loveholidays (loveholidays.com) for a family of three costs from ￡887 per person on a bed and breakfast basis including flights from Stansted for trips from September.