One word is the answer to my daughter’s car-sickness … and everything else | Séamas O’Reilly

One word is the answer to my daughter’s car-sickness … and everything else | Séamas O’Reilly

If she cries or struggles, we say ‘holiday!’ and the sacred word magically dispels the arduous longueurs of car travel

‘A perpetual holiday,’ wrote George Bernard Shaw, ‘is a good working definition of hell.’ I don’t know if that titan of Irish literature had my two-year-old daughter’s car-sickness in mind, but if he did, he might have been on to something.

Regular readers may remember me mentioning her vehicular vomiting before. Many of you – more, in fact, than I could possibly have anticipated – were good enough to contact me with all manner of remedies, suggesting everything from anti-nausea bracelets to antihistamine solutions and precise calibrations of air-conditioning and window tilt. These were, truly, gratefully received, but in the end the best advice, offered on innumerable occasions, was to reduce all visual stimulus. No books, screens or fiddly games for her to play from her car seat – in short, none of the distractions which otherwise keep a toddler from screaming with boredom during the seven-hour drive that ferry travel entails.

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