There comes an age when going on holiday with your parents feels like being still at school. Even the simple fact of having theses two words  “parents” and “holiday” in the same sentence seems as inappropriate as an elephant in a China shop. It usually happens around the end of adolescence. All you do is dreaming of the next year when finally you won’t have to sleep in hotels anymore and when at last you’ll be  allowed to break your back in half in a mosquito infected tent. No matter what conditions of your first summer without the parents, you expect freedom!

 As a consequence your last family holiday  seems as unbearable as a 20 year long prison sentence in a Turkish jail. How many teenagers do we spot every summer dragging themselves behind their fed up parents along touristic cobble stoned streets? They are everywhere. They breathe their despair in restaurants, which by the way doesn’t prevent them from ordering an expensive starter + main + dessert combo (their stomach seems to be the only zone free from martyrdom). At the beach they refuse to go in the water under the vague excuse there is no point in doing like everyone else. The teenager on holiday with his parents is a festival of hypocrisy. Because, of course, he or she would actually love to jump into the waves. But that’s the way it goes: being moody is a full-time job and it cannot tolerate your clenched jaw to relax for a moment. It is the unfortunate and exhausting age when you don’t want to do anything at all because everything seems dumb. The place can be paradise, the weather hotter than the sun itself, and let’s face it, some of these kids even have the good luck of having great parents… However there is nothing that can be done about it: they are experiencing hell on Earth, the ultimate humiliation of the gap between their age and their longing for independence.  It is a permanent walk of shame and it feels like having your head kept under the water of childhood. You want to break free, you want to scream, you want to become an adult but the time has not come yet. There is this last summer to spend, like a very long agony.

If only teenage crisis could as well take some holidays and this odd feeling of carrying the whole world’s misery on your shoulders disappear just for a summer… How many parents have to work the whole year to drag around this obnoxious relative who keeps repeating this nihilistic mantra: “No I don’ t want to do that ”.  Life is not always like it should be: it always takes you a few years to appreciate what you could have loved on the moment. We are so often late on our emotions. It is more than possible that the moody teenager will feel later the nostalgia of the past summers: “After all, family holidays weren’t that bad. The place was nice and I didn’t have to worry about anything.” He might as well get some remorse about his past behaviour. He should have smiled a bit more. But it will be too late. You’re never 16 again.