12 things to do on a rainy Bank Holiday

1. Shout at your kids about not sharing. Punctuate this monotony by occasionally exiling one/both of them to their bedroom.

2. Vaguely consider a baking project before realising that the tub of Stork at the back of the fridge is wildly out of date and there’s only one egg left in the box.

3. Suggest reading stories. Spend 20 minutes trying to read whilst simultaneously fending off the errant blows of your offspring as they attempt to fight with one another across your lap.

4. Start a craft project you saw on a blog/Pinterest/Instagram. Fail miserably.

5. Spend an hour cleaning up the mess from the failed craft project, muttering expletives and promising yourself “never again”.

6. Put some laundry in the washing machine. You might as well.

7. Go through the mandatory list of indoor activities (soft play, aquarium, etc) with your partner and veto all of them with “but everywhere will be packed because it’s pissing it down!”

8. Suggest family nap time to alleviate the boredom for half an hour. Navigate a tantrum thrown by your threenager as a direct result of this erroneous idea.

9. Put on a painfully cheerful movie (Disney or Dreamworks) and pray that it keeps the kids quiet for an hour while you drink coffee and mutter crossly about “fucking shitty Bank Holiday weather”.

10. Pile everyone into the car and go for a drive just to get out of the house. For added fun, throw in some guilt about unnecessary carbon emissions and your contribution to global warming.

11. Think about having a quietly desperate weep.

12. Console yourself with the fact that the kids don’t really know what a Bank Holiday is and that they’re not likely to remember how shitty this one is anyway. And that they’ve got a lifetime of this to live through, probably with kids of their own someday…