“How was the trip to Center Parcs with three generations of your partner’s family?” friends are asking politely. And to them I reply: “I’m still processing.” Here is what I learned:
The trick to spending time with children is to give up all pretence of adult life and descend willingly into a world where those over eight are simply used as security and for collecting snacks. And you must go willingly, you must make the choice, first to enter the compound, with its fattened ducks and eerie silence after 9pm, and then to submit fully to a week without saying no. There is a playground round every corner, there’s an entertainer at breakfast time – all meals come with crayons and some taste of them, too. In every restaurant there is a soft-play area, an idea that I urge all businesses to roll out, immediately – it means the children are not tied to their adults through the means of iPads and threats, instead popping over for their chips, then back again to their cousins to continue the construction of an elaborate structure made out of shoes. Which gives the grown-ups time to continue their new favourite game: “Here’s what I’m going to say in an email to the management about how to improve Center Parcs.” Who knew we were such geniuses of town planning and tourism? By the end of each day, we had designed our own far superior versions (my particular irritation was with the add-on prices for each activity, though we did enjoy holding a very large owl) and could rest in the knowledge that, like Westworld or Westfield, we could fix this heaven experiment over the course of an afternoon.
There are a handful of places in the UK where I am acutely aware that I’m Jewish, and this is one of them. This despite a colleague, having asked which Parc we were going to, smiling knowingly: “Ah, of course, the one for the liberal metropolitan elite.” Although the first time I visited Center Parcs, with my family and grandma when I was 10, we were perhaps the first chalet to host a full seder night, today we wear it lightly, I think, our Ashkenazi heritage, the only signs being the quantity of food my mother-in-law brought to barbecue and our bafflement at the boating lake. And yet I walked through this English land of burnt skin and badminton with a certain unplaceable anxiety. Perhaps everybody feels different here, a little apart from all the other guests with their artful manipulation of inflatables. It wasn’t until we were driving out into Bedfordshire, the barrier closing behind us, that it occurred to me we could have left at any time.
Walking through a high street that’s been plonked in an ancient forest makes you feel dirty, these proud old trees dwarfed by a bustling Café Rouge. The idea was that these parks would be “an effective way for city folk to experience the countryside”. But we experience it with such sad apology that it makes you consider, not the beauty and grandeur of nature, but our too-human impulse to knock it down.
I was awed by the 3G (three-generation) holiday, by the complete selflessness of my father-in-law choosing to spend his 70th birthday not at, say, a small Michelin-starred restaurant somewhere near the river, or in a comfortable living room surrounded by his many friends and a number of smoked salmon canapés, but instead with his kids and his kids’ kids, and those kids’ mothers, wiping ice cream off white T-shirts with a slightly dampened napkin. He made sandcastles in blazing heat, he detoured on foot to a supermarket to buy plasters with cartoon characters on them, he brought his own Nespresso machine, just in case.
You can call anything a swimming pool if you put water in it. I learned this fairly quickly, as soon as we entered the subtropical swimming paradise and jostled our way into the tepid bubbles. It is a disconcerting feeling when both air and water are the temperature of urine, especially when surrounded by young children. They quickly divide into the too-scared and the too-fearless, the latter leaping off plastic rocks and bombing down slides as if on a stag night, the former clinging to their mothers so hard they bruise their tattoos. Every half hour, a Tarzan call echoes through the dome, signalling the start of the wave machine, and everyone comes scuttering from their games to pile into the pool, where babies float with enthusiastic yet slightly detached expressions, like the Queen seeing cows. Standing in these waves feels like being on a plane going down, with all the screaming and spillage that entails. The subtropical swimming paradise has a Starbucks and its own weather system and a queue for the flumes, and it was while waiting for my family to navigate all this that I read a Mumsnet thread about someone’s Darling Husband returning home from the Longleat park a little bit miffed because he was sure she’d told him that “going to Center Parcs” was a euphemism for anal sex.
One more thing…
Some people hung knicker-bunting outside the Conservative MP Christopher Chope’s office after he blocked the recent bill to ban ‘upskirting’. It was the perfect (and perfectly British) response, and should be taken on in the future for all shows of contemptuous protest.
Hay fever is plaguing every one of us who is foolish enough to try to enjoy the weather. A ‘pollenution’ survey carried out by Boots found that 89% of people (me included) don’t realise that their hay fever symptoms can be worse in the city than in the countryside.
Julia Davis and Vicki Pepperdine’s podcast, Dear Joan and Jericha, makes me absolutely hoot. Their advice to listeners with sexual problems is unsurpassable, and I particularly enjoyed the sensitive discussion about how Joan plans to explode her mother.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.ukor follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
