There’s a tractor pulling a seedrill overtaking a conveyor belt driven by a 15-year-old

I don’t think the Roman alphabet has the guttural sounds available for it. Maybe it was lost along the way in the evolution from the Indo European steppe.

A load of sunny Latins smoothened it out to make it go with wine. Perhaps Xhosa has a few clicks for it. The closest approximation I can make is Khtokh-Plokh! It’s the sound of a toddler getting sick on herself in a car seat.

We were on a trip from Dublin to Achill. As anyone who’s travelled from Dublin to the west-northwest and northwest will know, there’s a moment where the motorway ends and you are back on the Ns.

It feels as if a guide who has been paid to take you to the frontier says: “Right, this is as far as I’m prepared to go. You’re on your own from here now.”

You watch your guide gallop away into the distance. But don’t watch for too long because in the oncoming traffic there’s tractor pulling a seed-drill overtaking a conveyor belt driven by a 15-year-old.

The road is no longer built from first principles like a motorway and instead starts to follow the landscape. And this following of the landscape, with its twists and turns and evidence of glacial melt, was what prompted my daughter’s stomach to launch themselves almost as soon as they had got in.

As if the Aldi Mango and Peach pouch had arrived in the stomach and realised, “Oh I’m sorry I think I’ve got the wrong address” and backed out.

The Khtokh-Plokh! also woke the baby. Now, the way it works at present, each one of the two will observe when the other is acting the maggot and then hold their fire because a) the quality of parenting they’ll get at that point won’t be great and b) it’s a great time to hoover up the brownie points. Not this time. There’s stereophonic howling. We’re on the side of the road near an abandoned building that’s probably a growhouse run by triads, Storm Dylan and Storm Eleanor are doing a handover, and the ambient light is the Farrow and Ball colour ‘Serious Crime Reconstruction’.

And it must be evolution or something but when the bad thing happens, a very important parental defence mechanism swing into place, one that is crucial for mental health. It’s a list of Things Why It Could Have Been Worse. We deploy it now within seconds, for the sake of mental health. The list has to be plausible. It can’t include, “Well she could have got bubonic plague.”

Although actually come to think of it, wasn’t it just as well she didn’t?

It definitely does include: she didn’t get much on the car seat; we had somewhere to pull in; traffic wasn’t too bad; we had a change of clothes for her, and perhaps this is a stretch, but just as well she was a toddler.

Because of the contents. The main difference between adult and toddler car sickness on weekends away is as follows: toddlers get sick on the way there, Johnno, Specs, Timmy Bones and the other ledgebags get sick on the way back. Smallies throw up fruit and porridge, ledgebags throw up burgers and some sort of shot that smells like the tailing pond of a chemical company under investigation for breaches of environmental regulations.

But the most important mental health defence when parent-managing a big sticky mess is yet to come. Banter-colleagues who get sick in your car make you like them less. When a small girl beset by a wave of something she has no control over, being in a car not driven by her, on a journey she had no vote on making, looks at you piteously from her fruit-puree-drenched cardigan, it makes you love her tiny bilious head just a smidge more.

Now does anyone know a good thing for getting smells out of cars?