Bear with me. Honestly, please give me two minutes to talk about the school holidays. Because I’m new to it, see, from this angle at least. Of course, I remember it from the other side, those gloriously boring deserts of time that stretched from July to infinity and took in almost 4,000 screaming rows and a number of own-brand Calippos.

In the early days of my now desiccated memory there are trips to Cornwall and long car journeys listening to Uncle Johnny’s Party Tape TM with its tight edit of Motown and Leonard Cohen (“Why do we have to listen to rabbi music?” I once whined), and there are also whole days down at the brook, banking our 5ps for a bottle of Tango. Then in later years, a slow promenade around Brent Cross, our local, well, now I suppose we’d call it a mall with no embarrassment? It was the first place we were allowed to go without adults, and we relished these hours gliding over its mezzanines of brutalist capitalism, these tuna sandwiches eaten like grown-ups, dangling our legs in the indoor fountain.

Scrolling online through photos of the polished interior from the 80s and 90s, with its bemused wooden animals standing guard outside Fenwick, was so overwhelmingly nostalgic that I had to sit down for a moment. I’m not alone – on Vimeo, over footage shot when ascending the escalator in 1992, someone’s composed a soundtrack “attempting to recreate from memory the sound of Brent Cross shopping-centre”, woozy organs against the rush of that fountain. That was the sound of the summer holidays, but no more. Nope.

The reality of a month and a half without school or nursery, when half of our potentially child-caring family members are away yet full-time work selfishly insists on continuing as normal, well, it’s been quite a surprise. This is the bit that you must bear with, because I know, even as I type it, that these are the brand of conversations you will actively spin away from at parties, the kind used later to illustrate how boring your friends have become. But it has thrown me, this problem suddenly appearing in my lap like a bat flapping through a window during breakfast – it is shocking, and stupid, and inevitably, because of my stained personality, I can draw a direct line from this to the subjugation of women.

Because it seems to me to be another sharp nail in the coffin of women’s careers. I know that it is not always women who carry the weight of flexibility and organising care – #notallwomen etc – but having frantically asked everyone with young children I’ve encountered over the past fortnight, it has without exception been the mother who has sighingly explained how they sort out the swimming camps, the drop-offs, the timetabling of holidays, the calling in of favours from neighbours and friends. Unless they don’t have a job – which itself is usually an unchoice made around the time they gave birth (and, call me cynical, seemingly a totally sane reaction to the impossibility of having it all) – then it is their career that suffers, picked away at by the beak of necessity. And their relationship, too – if they’re in a couple, the family will never holiday together, as the parents will each use their allocated days to be with the children, while enacting a complicated dance around the wall-calendar with their colleagues.

The standard holiday entitlement is 5.6 weeks – the school summer holidays alone are six weeks long. Even in term time, school finishes at about 3.30pm; work, as a rule, finishes at 5pm. I was in the bottom group of maths, but even I can see something doesn’t add up here.

We’re bringing up children in a pound-shop system – there are missing pieces, what’s there is made of bad plastic that breaks on impact, and where the engine should be there’s a box of bees. Working doesn’t work. Nannies, au-pairs, pssh, even if my generation of parents had the money we certainly do not have the spare bedrooms. Does this sound ranty? Petty? To me, new to all this and very bad at admin, it feels like a symptom of something, another thing, very broken. And apart from grand and decisive action from above, like a proper restructuring of the ways we work, or making childcare more affordable, I really can’t see a solution.

For the foreseeable future, the sound of the summer holidays for me will no longer be that dreamlike buzz of an air-conditioned shopping centre, instead the screaming of an online diary reminder against a low-level hum of anxiety, spiked with operatic moments of rage. I’ve looked behind the curtain of the summer holiday myth, and found an awful lot of dust.

One more thing…

I haven’t identified so strongly with anything as I recently did with the bin lorry that became stuck in Berkshire as roads across the country melted in the heatwave. I am that bin lorry, its wheels sunk into the oozing black, emanating a stench made worse by the sun, unglamorous and overcome by heat.

As the NHS turned 70, people shared their stories online of the many times it had saved their lives. And the effect, for me, was a grim sort of awakening, seeing how many people I know had been suffering in so many varied, frightening ways. Through it all, knowing they could rely on our underpaid, overworked, beautiful NHS.

A man found two plastic bags left behind in a loft, and, as he documented on Twitter, they contained a trove of historic LGBTQI+ pin badges. He took the collection to Gay’s The Word bookshop in London, where they’ll be displayed. I can’t wait to visit.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman

• This article was amended on 15 July 2018. The wooden animals at Brent Cross shopping centre were outside Fenwick’s, not John Lewis as an earlier version said.