What I did on my holidays

They were the highlights because my family would attempt to ruin the endless days of bliss by dragging me away to a part of the country where the sun never shone, the portable black and white couldn’t get a signal and the toilet needed emptying far too regularly.

Like all things we go through during those years, you never fully appreciate them until they become distant memories. The Kendal Mintcake, the pokey smoke-filled cinema, the boys at the campsite football match who thought my 70s hair made me a girl – oh, cherished memories.

At my smoking peak I was burning my way through 60 Rothmans a day while working as a sales rep. At no point during this period did I think “Hey, I love this thing so much I ought to hang out with some other people who do it to too.”

Now, fine, smokers do tend to congregate. We did it down the bottom of school playing fields, in works canteens and (for those who carried on into the smoking ban) doorways. The enforced conviviality of standing with strangers in alcoves must have had a lasting impression on us, a desire to share our experience.

Becoming a family man you have to draw up a set of rules, no one issues you with a book on Dadhood and if they did it would probably be a pile of toss written by someone who wants you to indulge in non-competitive games and refrain from using coarse language. It saddens me that while researching this piece a number of such tomes are readily available from your local bookstore. Little do they understand men – we don’t need no stinking instructions.

For anything.

So where do we draw our inspiration from? Well, in my case it is repeating all of those things that I hated as a kid so that my kids can look back fondly on the stupid things I made them do; we share our experiences, we pass down our stories.

The vaping journey has taken me into forums where the notion of “Hey, I love this thing so much I ought to hang out with some other people who do it to too” doesn’t seem as stupid as the fag-based version. And one, the Planet of the Vapes, arranged to hold a big get together for all of us keyboard warriors so that we could stand in the Lake District with a pint in hand and not recognise each other from our online avatars. We don’t share opinions about politics, football or an awful lot – unsurprisingly seeing as we are a cross-section of society. We share vaping and, seemingly, a liking for alcohol.

During one summer I stood at the top of Hardnott Pass holding the dog’s lead. I don’t know what the weather was like back then but I suspect it was raining. Last weekend I stood there with a couple of leads and two kids. And the sun shone on us all.

I have no idea if it is possible to extrapolate that all the vapers I was with were really nice people and therefore all vapers are really smashing types? I’ve no idea if forcing children to revisit the horrors of their parents’ past is as character-building as I’d like to hope even if I feel a failure because they enjoyed it so much.

What I do know is that the primary school notion of  ‘it is good to share’, experiences or otherwise, was deeply rewarding. Sitting sharing beers with vapers while swapping stories of nonsense I wondered if my Dad had felt the same?