Arguably, the main point of business travel is escaping family life. I have just spent five weeks away covering the World Cup, and though I often walked around Russian cities wishing I could show my wife and children what I was seeing, and though FaceTime calls weren’t enough, and though I worked 14 hours every day, the brutal truth is that I was grateful for the respite from family. Parenting sabbaticals keep parents sane.
Family life isn’t easy. Love is the easy bit. I care much more about my children than about me. Since they were born, I’ve come to regard my own death as a management issue. But the problem is being together every day. Children and adults just don’t have much in common. Kids find most of our conversations as boring as we find theirs.
Family life is about repetition. On Monday evening, everyone comes home and you have dinner together and, in the intervals between bickering, you find out a little about each other’s days. You tuck them in, tell them mechanically that you love them, then stagger off drained to spend what remains of the evening paying for their school lunches online. On Tuesday morning, it starts all over again.