School holidays on the canals

It's holiday time and the canals have something in the air again. The kids have broken up!

I've just put down my Bill Bryson book (Notes From a Small Island) and his train of thought has sent me drifting into a pointless muse over how foreign visitors to our island might interpret the Brit phrase - "The kids have broken up".

What does that mean? Broken in most Pavlovian respects doesn't sound too good to me. Broken (by definition implies out of order), broken-down (in despair, needing fixing), broken-up (as in disintegrated, or worse, potentially ruined).

So when the kids break up, do they scatter into chaos from their safe homogenised mass? Does it scare us that they come to sunny canals all across Britain in ones and twos, with bikes, on boats, in flip flops and wide-eyed smiles on the towpaths?

Answers on a postcard.