I was just having a wander through Amazon, when I came across this book by Emma Kennedy (actress and writer from Goodness Gracious Me, The Smoking Room and The Now Show). It resonated so much with me that I just had to write about it on here. It's about holidays in a time before Center Parcs when all you had was a tent (or a caravan in our case) a bucket and went off to Wales or France to create your own adventures. It has just been released and I can't wait to get my hands on a copy.
Click over the cut for the blurb.
Growing up in the Seventies, we were on the brink of the modern age. But despite a brave new world of Casio hand-held calculators and digital watches, one thing remained the same: the family holiday. For the Seventies child, summer holidays didn't mean the joy of Center Parcs or the sophistication of a Tuscan villa. They meant being crammed into a car with Grandma and heading to the coast. With just a tent for a home and a bucket for the necessities, we would set off on new adventures each year stoically resolving to enjoy ourselves.For Emma Kennedy, and her mum and dad, disaster always came along for the ride no matter where they went. Whether it was swept away by a force ten gale on the Welsh coast or suffering copious amounts of food poisoning on a brave trip to the south of France, family holidays always left them battered and bruised. But they never gave up. Emma's memoir, "The Tent, the Bucket and Me", is a painfully funny reminder of just what it was like to spend your summer holidays cold, damp but with sand between your toes.
