You can always tell when the holidays are on.

I’m not talking about public holidays, those one-day events that are merely an excuse for an epic Tuesday hangover. No, the fault here lies with those two-week clumps of school leave that always seem to hit just when I want to go somewhere nice.

Now, I don’t have kids - as mandated by the UN - not that there’s anything wrong with having them, of course. Some of my best friends are munchkin ranchers. Really.
But this being the case, why should it bother me when the dirt magnets are on the tear? Because, come evening peak hour, the way the roads work is completely different from the norm. Generally, there are only two classes of idiot that you’ll encounter. The morons going faster than you (good luck to them, I say) and the utter clowns who have the temerity to go slower.

But when the ankle biters have downed crayon, things are different. For a start, those ridiculous forty-kay signs aren’t flashing, which is actually quite good for the blood pressure. Darwin must be generating enough torque over that one to give Jeremy Clarkson a chubby: hasn’t anyone in the OH & S world ever heard of natural selection? And besides, the only person that you’ll ever see speeding in front of schools is the soccer mum with a carload of kids. You have to see her point – why should she slow down? Her kids are safe. Besides, the sooner she dumps- er, drops them off, the quicker she can get to her ‘tennis lesson’ with Miguel.

I almost don’t have the heart to point this out, but it’s also fairly pointless having the speed restriction out the front of the school. Think about it; that’s the exact point where the kids won’t be on the road. The ‘40’ signs should be in front of the real high risk areas in which the short folk congregate: - milk bars, skate parks, (pony clubs, I suppose), and the house where that year eleven girl lives. You know, the one who hit her ‘growth spurt’ over the summer.

But when the holidays are on, we swap one hazard for another. Because hols mean the kids are home, and this in turn means that swarms of nannas and pops descend like Heritage-listed Griswalds upon the built up areas in order to visit with them. Without getting into the (undoubtedly) hilariously entertaining area of family dynamics, these geriatric vacations create a problem that affects everyone, not just you breeders. Oh, shut up, you know you are.

The trouble starts at evening peak hour, when these befuddled old farts hit the highways like so many wobbly Wildebeest. With just about no idea as to either destination or route, incidentally. Just cruising along in the fast lane at a steady 28 knots with the blinker on, to the sound of nan screaming, “Clarry! SLOW DOWN!”, while maintaining a white knuckle grip on (simultaneously) her seatbelt, the Jesus handle, the dashboard, the handbrake lever, and grandad’s now-separated shoulder. Nannas have LOTS of arms – each and every one armed with a death-dealing, suffocation inducing bye-bye.

Anyway, where are they going at six in the evening? It’s not to dinner; they had that at two, and tomorrow’s breakfast around half-five. Maybe when they woke from their post-prandial nap to a dusky sky, they imagined it to be morning, and ‘got going early on the run to Dubbo’. Fine, but then why go so slowly? You’d imagine people with so little time left would be in more of a hurry.

And that’s the thing: The Olden Farts are doing forty (EVERYwhere), and they’re not very safe, now are they?

It’s probably mildly evil of me, but I’m waiting now for one of those self-congratulatory political road shows to pop up out the front of one of our fine primary learning installations during morning peak hour. Just a quick trip for the local member to pat himself on the back before your huddled masses. Showing them how, with the signs all aflash, it’s now quite safe for the year fours to play cricket on the footpath out the front.

I then imagine the local MP’s antiquated mother quite coincidentally Braille-ing her way down the main drag in a clapped out smoky behemoth, perhaps her late brother’s 65Galaxie. In no hurry of course – she’s old, after all - rhythmic braking to the beat of whatever tossy random opinion generator yaks away on 3AW nowadays. Captain Polling Booth is extolling to the assembled ante-pubescent masses the virtues of the latest safety campaign that protects not by educating - hey, this is a school, after all - but by legislating everyone else to a standstill. Just as our favourite pork barreller (does anyone actually know what that means?) gets to the part where he tells the kids they’ll never need to look before crossing the street again because the passing cars are being overtaken by foot traffic, mama ploughs through the assembly at precisely thirty-eight kilometres per hour, taking out everyone over the age of nineteen (it’s a wide car).

That’s probably only an Alanis level of irony, but oh-so-sweet nonetheless.

Now tell me; wouldn’t THAT be worth a public holiday?