Julie Jay: On the road again with our travelling circus and things are getting crowded in our car

Travelling light is impossible when you have an adorable six-month-old in tow

A while back I was booking flights for myself and a friend and suggested we go for the ‘travel light’ option. 

My friend was less than convinced. 

"I’ve never backpacked before," she mused, despite the fact this ‘backpacking’ holiday involved a stay in a four-star hotel and a spa treatment.

"Live a little," I said, and quicker than you can say ‘will this fit under a seat’ we were confirmed and committed to flying with just one pair of jeans (it will be a weekend of fingers tremulously opening yoghurts for fear of a spillage and a disastrous pants staining).

But now I have young children, there’s never the possibility of travelling light because you will always have more bags than people when you have a baby in your midst. 

Due to work commitments, we’ve been on the road once again with our travelling circus and things are getting decidedly crowded in our 2009 chariot of choice.

I certainly haven’t helped matters. Aside from dragging around Paul Murray’s latest novel, The Bee Sting, in the vain hope I might get to read it, I’ve also decided to pack luxury items like matching socks and enough knickers for a daily underwear change, as if I were a woman without commitments.

Our three-year-old has also insisted we take the Santie tractors with us, and though we are big fans of the Big Man himself for bringing such crowd-pleasing gifts, we beg him to study dimensions going forward. 

One combine harvester is so big I’m fairly sure Michael D was pictured straddling it at the Ploughing Championships. Just when you think the front passenger seat couldn’t get any more claustrophobic, my husband tops my pile of miscellaneous items with his own copy of The Bee Sting because we don’t consult with one another enough when it comes to purchasing Christmas gifts.

But it’s the baby that’s really testing the capacity of our Nissan Almera’s increasingly crowded boot. 

Despite being a tiny person, travelling with our six-month-old JJ involves a serious amount of haulage to keep us ticking over for even, as in this case, the most flying of weekend trips to the Big Smoke.

Of course, if we lived in sunnier climes, I imagine we’d have less luggage to carry. But because we live in a country where you could leave the house in the morning wearing an extremely forgiving sarong and come home that same day wearing not one but two winter coats like a Dickensian caricature, even Joanna Donnelly couldn’t be predicting the weather when it comes to choosing baby outfits for a 48-hour period.

It’s not just clothes that are the issue, it’s planning for a place to lay the baby down. The problem with visiting family is that everyone needs a bed unless you are Charlie of the chocolate factory, in which case multiple generations will just hop into either end of the double. 

But it is especially important that JJ gets his own place to rest his tiny baby head as, let’s face it, he is the star of the show these days. 

It’s basically JJ’s world and we all get to live in it, I think to myself as I rearrange our multiple copies of The Bee Sting (turns out my husband purchased a copy for my mother, and I bought one for his dad) which are scattered all over our trunk to make room for the pram. In what is surely Russian doll levels of multi-purpose, this pram will also double up as JJ’s bed because I’m all for killing two birds with the one stone these days, wherever possible.

So much so that I nearly purchased a conditioner and shampoo in one until I reminded myself that the last time I bought a two-in-one, I ended up losing clumps of hair and not in the places you’d hope. 

Once we’ve got the baby chair, the sterilisers, the bottle brushes, the jumperoos all packed up, we’re officially on the road. It is a wonder the car can move at all what with the weight of accoutrements we have brought with us, covering the myriad eventualities that might befall us on our travels.

Inevitably, no matter how much you bring, you never bring enough. On arriving at my parents' house last night, I immediately realised somebody needed to dash to the shop to get Bonjela and Calpol because my husband was teething (Old Wisdom strikes again).

My parents’ sitting room is currently like an obstacle course with

gargantuan baby bouncers, baby chairs, and playpens. I don’t know how a baby so tiny could utilise things that feel so ridiculously big, but the whole thing gives us a real Lilliputian energy (as in the Jonathan Swift book, not the Northern English city). 

The thing with a baby is you have to give yourself over completely to that little person taking over your life and, by extension, taking over your sitting room. Admittedly, it can all feel a bit like the '90s game show Crystal Maze as you navigate the obstacles between you and the telly remote, but it’s a small price to pay for getting to share your baby with your extended family.

And, of course, the odds of us going backpacking anytime soon are slim, but I couldn’t be living out of one bag anyway, what with all the copies of contemporary fiction in my possession. Travelling light is fine for people without kids or who own Kindles, but for the rest of us, like Metro North, it is little more than fantasy football.