All travel carries an element of risk, although most parents – myself included – tend to play it on the safe side, especially with younger kids. For reasons not only of expense but also sheer practicality and the sake of an easy life, most of our family's current wanderings are limited to Europe. I’d love to take my kids elephant-riding in India, surfing in Hawaii and on long-distance trains across Australia, but such adventures will have to wait for I time when I consider the inherent dangers (and the expense) to be justified by their enjoyment. At 7, 5 and 2, they’re not yet at a point where they can fully appreciate that kind of holiday.

Children like routine, we’re told, and though I’ve never been a devotee of Gina Ford and her military-style regimes, I’ve always tried to keep my kids on a loose schedule. If I’m honest, this may have been more for my sake than theirs – with the two older boys only a year-and-a-half apart, getting them to nap together and to bed at a reasonable hour allowed my husband and I to keep the boys at home and muddle through as freelance writers – and stay sane.

Regularity, repetition and ritual give young kids a sense of security, a feeling that the world is orderly and subject to our control. But of course it’s not. As the ash cloud has forcefully reminded us, we humans are not as in control as we’d like to think we are. Sometimes nature lets us know who’s really boss.

But in terms of travelling with kids, I’d argue that the loss of control is yet another good reason why we take them away. Children’s lives become so hidebound by routine and schedules, it’s great to get away and let a bit of slack into their lives. So what if they’re running around in the woods until gone 10 o’clock, or want to go for a night-time dip in the waves – they can always lie-in in the morning (those with infants who wake with the larks will be glad to hear that this can and will happen, in time).

But more fundamentally, isn’t it desirable to start subtly, subconsciously, letting slightly older children in on the secret that we – as parents, but also as members of the human race – are not always in charge? That things can and do go wrong. That life is unpredictable and sometimes even dangerous, without us being able to do anything about it. That sometimes we might not be able to get home.

While I don’t envy my colleagues at takethefamily.com who got stranded abroad with their young kids, and while I don’t doubt that it must have been a royal pain in the bum a lot of the time, I think my older sons would have taken the fact of being stranded abroad as an adventure and – despite the waiting around and the tedium – in many ways relished the excitement of it. In fact, I rather suspect that they’re reaching the age where they actually quite like things to go wrong, because it’s interesting and perhaps even fun. 

All travel carries some risk, but then so does crossing the road, driving to the supermarket or playing on the trampoline in the garden. That things can and usually will go wrong isn’t a reason not to go away. In fact, isn’t it the horror stories that make the best travel anecdotes, in any case? Who wants to hear about beaches, after all? There’s more than a little schadenfreude in us all.