Colm O'Regan: For a blissful couple of days, your children are out ambling in the middle of the road
Comedian and Irish Examiner columnist Colm O'Regan pictured in Cork. Picture: Denis Minihane.
The children are in bed. I’m sitting out the back, in beautiful weather, slurping a tin of beer and piling into the lentil crisps, gazing into the endless forest. (Well, endless until you get to Houses #300 to #330.) Heaven.
Who would have thought we’d all be going on holidays to Longford? Lots of people presumably, but even more now. Center Parcs is gradually seeping into the cultural landscape. Forming memories for today’s children to do nostalgia memes about in 2035.
This isn’t an ad for Center Parcs (I forgot to ask for money) but just a thought on two things that happen there that make you think a bit about how we design places to live in the real world. To make it more sustainable.
Now holidays are hard to make truly sustainable. The most sustainable holiday is to stay in your house and read library books on foreign countries. But people, the divils, kinda like to go somewhere else on holiday so that they can not do the washing and not be reminded about jobs around the house.
Center Parcs’s subtropical 29°C dome is bound to be fairly hard enough on the electric. And most people drive there. You can get a bus from Dublin apparently — although that requires a level of packing discipline for which I would need a bit of training. You can’t be “throwing a Nutribullet in at the last minute just in case”.
I’ll let a Center Parcs sustainability lead circle back on all of that.
BUT. There are two things about Center Parcs that are (as far as I can see) unequivocally good and maybe something to think about in the real world.
Number 1. There are no lawns or garden walls. The front of every house is a continuous riotous mix of plants. A level of thistles that would have given my late father a conniption. Alive and humming with bees, hoverflies, damselflies, butterflies, I can’t-believe-they’re-not-butter flies. Surely the decline of the Compulsory Lawn is at least one thing that’s come out of this nature mess we’re in. And Center Parcs' front gardens are a lovely mess. And because everyone’s is the same, (and no one owns anything), there’s no one tut-tutting to the Tidy Towns. And judging by the loud birdsong, birds seem to like it there too.
Number 2. There are NO cars. For those who haven’t been, Center Parcs gives you a short window to bring your car up the house and bring out all your gear and atrociously-packed household stuff (the last-minute microwaveable popcorn packed with the phone charger), dump it in the house and then bring your car back to the car park and leave the fecking thing alone for three or four or seven nights. You’re not allowed to bring your car in. It’s 10 minutes' walk away. You don’t need it. Leave it. LEAVE IT.
So for a blissful couple of days, your children are out ambling in the middle of the road like Just Stop Oil. The only risk to them is from other children cycling. It’s like it was during the Emergency. But with bananas and clothes that fit.
You walk or cycle everywhere. You get out of a car habit, even if just for a while.
Of course, this is holidays, not real life. But it’s just interesting being in a sort-of-village without a car. Seeing roads as just routes to walk, untidy landscape. It kind of makes you think about how come we didn’t build any truly car-less or car-less-ish villages ever this century. How everything is Car Outside the House. Lovely Lawn. I’m not talking about no cars. Just cars a few minutes away. I’m not talking about everywhere, just an experiment, a model village.
Holiday village holidays can be expensive. But ideas are free.
