Bumps on tour

Holidays. Who doesn’t love them?

Weeks filled with parading around in flip-flops, swigging orange Bacardi Breezers, donning airport sunglasses, dodging sexually transmitted diseases, and publicly showcasing your questionable fashion sense.

That was how they went in the past, at least. Not anymore.

Now you are wallowing in maturity and impending fatherhood, filled with responsible notions and a sense of familial protection. In other words, you’re screwed.

It starts on the way to the airport. Or to the train station. Or bus station, rik-shaw rank, swinging-vine terminal, or whatever your chosen mode of transport happens to be.

Your lady friend is visibly ‘with child’ so there is no way on Lucifer’s lush planet that she can be seen carrying anything heavier than lip balm or a mobile phone in your presence. That leaves you lugging three suitcases up escalators, on and off two wheeled trolleys, and heaving their slippery-from-your-own-sweat masses up onto the check-in belt.

Should she even look in the direction of a suitcase handle, you will be struck down by the evil eye of public shame.

When you arrive on the other end, you must repeat the same physical abuse lest you become the recipient of ‘foreigner scorn’. That’s worse than normal scorn because it’s scorn with an accent, tan, and good teeth.

You then proceed to spend 7 hours of each day searching for the nearest acceptable bathroom, followed by 3 hours standing outside it, holding bags filled with maternity bras and trying desperately not to look like someone who should be reported to shopping centre security.

When you are finally out of the accusing glare of mall pervert-cam, you get your holiday reward.

You are free to walk the streets hand in hand with her of swelled belly fame, and nothing quite beats that.

Granted, it’s not a Piña Colada, inflatable donkey or a sombrero you are dragging behind you, but it is your entire family. Your whole family wrapped up in amniotic and uterine goodness. Safe and cosy inside a bump, drawing sheepish half smiles from the people you catch looking from face, to bump, to face.

Orange Breezers always tasted like piss anyway.