The Four Books I Read On Holiday

I am writing this post from a café table in the local soft play centre. It is only the third hour of the school half term holidays and already I have developed the hangdog, deeply-sighing look of a person who cannot cope with the work-life juggle when term ends. Who has once again not planned ahead and so finds herself trying to shoehorn her work in by snatching illicit hours here and there in completely unsuitable places.

If you have ever tried to write from a soft play centre then you will know my pain. The noise levels in here are far beyond any legal limit, the volume of the screams and cries amplified due to the fact that this particular soft play is housed in a gigantic metal-roofed structure. A bit like an aircraft hangar or one of those enormous agricultural barns you see when you’re driving across certain parts of America.

You’d think that the irregularly-shaped (soft!) apparatus would go some way to deadening the noise, but no. If you can imagine a mob of two hundred munchkins going to war, all speeding their tits off on blue food colouring and aspartame, that’s what it sounds like.

All I’m saying is, don’t expect anything Booker-Prize-Winning from this post. A child on the next table is having a meltdown because he has friction burns from the slide and the woman behind me is conducting a group Facetime on speakerphone because her nan has never seen a soft play before and – I quote – “always thought it was some kind of sex den”.  

“IT’S NOT A SEX DEN NANA, LOOK!’ the woman is bellowing as she moves her phone screen around to present a panoramic view to her audience.

‘LOOK NANA! LOOK! TELL HER MUM, TELL HER IT’S NOTHING LIKE THAT, IT’S SLIDES AND OBSTACLE COURSES FOR KIDS!”

“Wipe clean surfaces and blow-up mattresses?’ Nana is saying, ‘it looks like a sex den to me!”