All these years later – and admittedly, from the immunity of a great distance – it remains one of my favourite stories from the perils of parenting.

We were on a long car journey and, as usual, there was chaos in the back seat, with my three small children fighting, tormenting each other and generally shredding my own nerves. ‘Let’s play I Spy,’ I suggested, in a moment of madness.

A few short minutes later, the youngest was in torrents of tears as the older two had torn ahead of her on the score board, meaning that she hadn’t managed to take a turn.

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‘Let her have a go,’ I demanded, wondering if it would be acceptable for me to open the passenger seat and tuck and roll onto the motorway. Between ugly, hiccuping sobs, the four-yearold just about managed ‘I spy with my little eye, something beginning with T’.

‘A unicorn,’ replied her brother, instantly. ‘Correct,’ came the sobbing response, as I reached for the door handle.

At least now I know I’m not alone. According to a new – and admirably honest – survey, one in three drivers have had a near miss on the road due to the stress of driving with children.

The study of 500 parents, commissioned by Volvo, found 52% of parents feel anxious about embarking on long car journeys with children in the back seat, with the most significant distractions for parents included bickering siblings, screaming, children wriggling out pf their seatbelts and a barrage of questions.

And for 19%, the chaos in the back seat had actually resulted in minor bumps with other vehicles.

To be fair, we never had a close encounter due to the never-ending, teeth-clenching business of driving with children.

As the front seat passenger, it was my job to act as the buffer between the driver and the kids, so that all their madness, their demands, their questions and their disputes had to be channeled through and settled by me.

They may be grown up now, but honestly, I can still recall the visceral pain of being driven as close to madness by those journeys as by any other stresses in my life.

Once, I asked my Dad how he had avoided losing his mind driving us four children up and down the country for many years and he confessed that not only had he skirted along the edge of reason, he wasn’t sure he’d ever recovered from the experience.

But we were a bold bunch. Before any long car journey commenced, my brother would man-spread across the back seat, squashing us two younger girls together into a space designed for half a person, and inform the youngest that his intention was to ‘tease, thwart and torment’ her for the entire journey ahead.

THIS meant she was usually already in tears before my Dad had even turned the key in the ignition. Then, before we’d even pulled out of the driveway, we’d start bombarding our unfortunate parents with ‘are we nearly there?’ questions, which wouldn’t let up until, well, we were nearly there.

And so the journey would continue, constant chaos between the three younger kids only occasionally alleviated by my mother reaching back and trying to smack small legs as we ducked and dived out of the way.

Our stoic older sister, meanwhile, above such childish things, would consult her thick copy of the Shell Guide to Ireland and read aloud the entries for every town we passed through. I don’t know which drove my parents more demented.

The universe had its revenge when my own turn came. We didn’t have the Shell Guide but we did have an enthusiastic puker, just to add an extra element of jeopardy to the craziness in the car.

More often than not, we would arrive at our destination in different clothes to the ones we’d set out in and with several plastic bags of vomit adding to the general hellish stink in the car. If we’d needed a holiday before we set out, we needed two by the time we got there.

Eventually, broken, I gave up and started travelling by train with the kids where possible while their Dad went ahead in the car. That might sound mad but it’s not nearly as mad as I was going.

This was all before screens, incidentally, which I’d presumed had finally ended the stress of travelling with children. But this latest survey is from the post-screen apocalypse and the kids are still driving their parents mad in cars.

Maybe it’s just a rite of passage that we all have to go through, the price of the crazy optimism of taking children on holidays. In which case – and with another four weeks to go before the happy release of going back to school – be careful out there.

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