9 holidays I wish I had never been on.

Holidays I Wish I Had Never Been On is a memoir that uses a sequence of calamitous childhood holidays as memory palaces to reconstruct the slow collapse of a 1980s Nouveau Riche British family.

At its core is the narrator’s complicated bond with his father — a charismatic, destructive millionaire whose potent mix of charm and gangsterism made him both magnetic and profoundly unsafe.

Each chapter is structured around a specific trip, from the snow-blindness that ends a ski holiday in Les Angles at age four, to a mortifying encounter with a bodyguard from Abba in Palma, to the moment in Florida when a Polaris submarine commander casually hands him the actual trigger to the UK’s nuclear deterrent.

Across France, Spain, Egypt, and America, the narrator is repeatedly uprooted and remade, his childhood unravelling against a backdrop of luxury resorts, dysfunctional parenting, and surreal events: Developing scurvy in Nice from too much chocolate mousse, and dancing to “Agadoo” in Tenerife while gripped with existential dread. A traumatising wanking competitions with older boys on a ski trip to Grenoble.

Amid the absurdity, the story charts the child’s growing awareness of the madness around him. His father, violent when drunk and deeply unmoored, creates a volatile emotional climate. Despite betrayals and monstrous behaviour, the narrator clings to him, desperate for a sense of safety and belonging. By thirteen, following a catastrophic day buying new school shoes, he runs away for good and seeks refuge with his grandmother — and her four dogs, Zim, Zu, Zar, and Zel, who become the four Yorkshire Terriers of his apocalypse — offering the first true witness and emotional shelter he has ever known.

But a drowning father is not so easily escaped. Soon after, penniless and flailing, the man reappears at their door with one last delusion: to launch a pop career for his nineteen-year-old “chanteuse,” Lisa Lee. Perhaps, if he can get her onto New Faces of 1988, he can finally make enough money to rebuild what he lost — his image, his power, and the family he broke apart. The narrator, now older, bears witness to this final chapter — absurd, melancholy, and strangely beautiful — that marks the end of his youth.

This memoir is not a misery narrative. It is a forensic, darkly funny survival epic, told through the lens of a child’s confusion and an adult’s clarity. With no tidy redemption arc, it instead offers sharp, emotionally intelligent writing laced with gallows humour and nostalgia for Commodore 64 loading screens. Holidays I Wish I Had Never Been On is a story of chaos navigated through imagination, humour, and the stubborn will to stay sane. It will resonate strongly with modern readers in this difficult age.