Nambucca Heads.Credit: Simone DePeak
One child is bawling, face-down in her plate of chicken stir fry, shreds of coriander spraying from the plate with every convulsion. The other is hiding under another table in the far corner of the dining room, giving away his position with a screeched "No!" every five seconds.
My pregnant wife is staring morosely at her watermelon-sized belly. I am delirious, thanks to a virus, and only vaguely aware of the waitress picking up broken glass from the floor as I put on, then take off, then put on again, a jumper, a scarf and a beanie in a futile bid to keep pace with my body's fluctuating temperature.
The 10-hour drive from Sydney to the North Coast is a long haul. Anyone with children would be mad to attempt it in one go. Hence our break at Nambucca Heads, where we are discovering that stopping overnight only prolongs the agony.
We have spent an hour in a caravan park cabin, trying to make up bunk beds that have been built so close together that my wife becomes stuck and has to be levered out using a broom and some washing-up liquid.
A "10-minute walk, mate" to the bowlo takes an hour and our offspring decide to display the full array of dining etiquette skills they learned at the chimps' tea party summer school that they must have been attending, before having meltdowns so impressive that Greenpeace is thinking of using them as proof of global warming.
"Maybe you should change tables," says the waitress as she plugs in the vacuum cleaner.
I stare at the tablecloth decorated with orange juice, peas, crayon and roast lamb, and try to work out at what stage of proceedings someone slipped LSD into my water.
"Oh ... my ... God ..." groans my wife and she starts to run towards the exit.
This is no mean feat at six months' pregnant. In fact, it's not so much running as a cross between galloping and waddling: she's "walloping" and she's doing it at some pace.
I stagger after her, and there, in the main hall, at the business end of a bowling mat, is our son, who has decamped from beneath table 23 and is standing over a set of bowls as the eyes of about 120 old-aged pensioners bore into him.
He bends his knees and extends a chubby little arm towards the jack.
The crowd gasps. An old lady collapses. A set of dentures clunks as it hits the floor.
Then into the scene bounds my pregnant wife. Momentum has taken over and she is barrelling along like a snowball in an avalanche. Without breaking stride she picks the boy up under one arm, steps over the bowls, crosses the other mats and wallops straight out of the main doors and into the fresh air.
"Sorry about the interruption," I mutter as I stumble past, closely followed by our still wailing daughter, who plucks a noodle from her hair and scoffs it on the way out.
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