IT COULD be boules on the beach, frites at the fairground or sneakily drinking wine under the duvet, and how I wish it were. But ask me to encapsulate my childhood holidays in a single image and there I am, sliding about on the back seat with my siblings as we reverse away from a gesticulating gendarme.

For my father, the annual continental holiday was less about where we went than how we went there. Brief answer: slowly. The drive south was an end in itself, to be undertaken with the ruminative reverence of a pilgrimage; his holy grail was a route from Calais to Cannes, undertaken exclusively on the Michelin map’s green-bordered itinéraires agréables.

Every time we bumped on to another of these dilatory rustic byways, the back seat would strike up its sliding anthem, a weary, lilting cowboy lullaby that was the very sound of sloth. Sometimes we’d pootle distantly beneath or above an autoroute and gaze wistfully at the Med-bound traffic which was whooshing across viaducts and into tunnels, being fast-tracked to fun.

Once we even pooled our holiday pocket money and offered to pay the motorway tolls so we could get there faster. With my mother nearly always asleep and my father off in a vista-gazing, château-watching world of his own, behind their headrests anarchy took hold. We threw fruit, we threw punches, we threw up. No one would have heard us ask if we were nearly there. But we never bothered, because we never were.

Predictably enough, when adulthood presented me with a wife, a child and a vehicle of my own, I wasted no time in eagerly recommitting the holiday sins of the father.

Together with half a dozen friends we’d booked a villa just north of Montpellier, but were reluctant to join them in their dawn-to-dusk thrash down the Autoroute du Soleil.

With 15-month-old Kristjan in the back of an elderly Citroën BX that had recently earned us a brusque reminder of the AA’s “fair play” policy on excessive callouts, we expected to take in at least a couple of sunsets en route. It had been manufactured in an age before the ubiquity of air-conditioning and CD players and lacked the prerequisite facilities for efficient and humane trans-continental infant transport.

Having celebrated his debut Channel crossing by passionately embracing all-comers in the soft play area, Kristjan was overheated even before wisps of steam began curling out of the air vents as we thunked down the ferry ramp.

The hissing engine coughed and died at the first set of lights, and with the toots of furious motorists behind swelling to a furious frenzy I accepted that this journey was not to be the rolling masterclass on motoring technique and etiquette offered free of charge by all British drivers abroad. The Citroën was home, and clearly didn’t want to leave.

We got it started again, but the temperature gauge inched remorselessly upwards as we wound slowly along the D roads of the Somme.

Then, somewhere around Beauvais, my wife inadvertently discovered that by cranking the heater up to maximum, surplus heat could be diverted into the cabin, thus luring the needle back from the brink.

Mechanical relief came at a terrible price. Even with all the windows down, the in-car atmosphere recalled that of a U-boat engine room. Had our son been a goat, we’d have faced prosecution for breaching EU regulations on the movement of livestock.

Moist and pallid in his stifling safety enclosure, even as he slipped into semi-comatose febrility Kristjan maintained an iron grip on the in-car playlist. His musical tastes were simple. Of the several dozen cassettes we had brought along, he would countenance just one: Dyrin I Halsaskoginn, an animal-based children’s opera that was the ankle-deep high-water mark of the attempt to raise our half-Icelandic offspring bilingually.

Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Echo and the Bunnymen, even Peter and the Wolf: any rival for Kristjan’s affections was snatched out of the tape deck while they were still clearing their throats.

I held things together for the first three dozen rewinds, but just past Orléans, with the smouldering footwells exuding a narcotic blend of burnt oil and nappy fumes, I entered a world without reason, a world ruled by a cheeky little mouse in a horned helmet. Thank goodness my wife rescued me from it and quaveringly insisted that we stop for the night.

Part of the attraction of the trans-Gallic drive for me, and almost all of it for my wife, was the chance to enjoy the small château hotels. The one we chose on that first night was plucked from the Michelin red guide: with two red towers and a rocking chair beside its name, it would be both particulièrement agréable and très tranquille.

Kristjan was the juvenile embodiment of these attributes, yet watching those pinched faces recoil behind their menus as he tottered beside us across the chandeliered dining-room, it was clear that his mere presence had — as an irate Parisian said years afterwards in a tirade against our little girls — offended the calm of the establishment.

“Seen and not heard” might be the default Gallic policy on children; this gathering of sour fundamentalists had upgraded that to “should never have been born”.

When Kristjan made the mistake of toddling up to a nearby table with a shy smile on his face and a pat of butter in his outstretched hand, its occupants all but leapt out of their red rocking chairs and hurled him to some distant point in that vue exceptionelle.

Having set off two days before our friends, we arrived a day after. But by then, we’d already begun to plot our circuitous route home. The red guide had granted us two, more successful hotels, Dyrin I Halsaskoginn was stretched by overuse into an oddly soothing mantra, and a battery of dash-mounted cardboard deflectors now managed our climate control. Though when they all flew up into my face as some flash-happy, bumper-sucking lunatic harried us towards Clermont-Ferrand, I stamped my right foot to the floor and kept it there for ten solid hours.

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