By In my local shopping centre, there is a soft play area. I’m exaggerating slightly – it’s six foam mats and a slide tucked underneath an escalator halfway between Debenhams and New Look – but my children love it. I take them there several times a week. It’s a place where I can sit down and let them gleefully exhaust themselves. It’s not great, but it’s free and it does the job.
However, it’s the summer holidays now, which means that it’s suddenly my least favourite place on Earth. I’d rather have my eyeballs stabbed by dirty syringes in Aleppo than ever go to this poxy soft play area again. The reason? Seven-year-olds.
The signage on the soft play area is very clear. It’s for children aged five and under. It’s written there in big letters, right next to the height chart designed to show everyone as clearly as possible that THIS IS NOT A PLACE FOR SEVEN-YEAR-OLDS. Seven-year-olds are not welcome there. It’s heavily implied that seven-year-olds should go and do more suitable seven-year-old activities instead, like watching The Sopranos or drinking coffee.
And yet the place is full of seven-year-olds. It’s packed with them, clattering around like a squadron of idiot Godzillas lost in a model village, all screaming and flailing and carelessly knocking over the toddlers, even though they absolutely shouldn’t be there. Honest to god, a seven-year-old in an under-fives playground enrages me like nothing else on Earth. I hate them. If Boris Johnson had commissioned a bus that promised to take all seven-year-olds who play in under-fives playgrounds, encase them in lead and fire them directly at the sun, I would have voted for Brexit. That’s how much I hate them.
But here’s something I recently figured out. I’m a dad, so I’m an automatic authority figure to these seven-year-old idiots. If I lose my temper with one of these giant bonk-eyed twits – perhaps because I’ve had to throw myself over my one-year-old like an unexploded grenade just to stop him from being trampled – then they shit themselves. Their eyes widen and they go silent and they very conspicuously avoid my children for the rest of the afternoon. I’ve had to do this a few times now, and I’m sort of getting a kick out of it.
All parents know the Angry Stranger trick. If my kids are misbehaving in a cafe, I’ll point at an oblivious stranger two seats over and tell them how annoyed that person will be if they don’t get their act together. It always works. I’ve been that oblivious stranger before too, because that’s how the Angry Stranger trick functions. It’s an interparental whisper network of outsourced discipline. It’s perfect. But now I am actually becoming an angry stranger in real life, and it feels like my calling.
I’ve never liked confrontation. Early on in my career I hated confrontation so much that I’d let unpaid invoices slide, just because I didn’t want to make a fuss. But now that I’m a parent, something has changed. It might be because I want to protect my kids. It might be because I want to hold everyone to the same standards I set for myself. It might just be sleep-deprived crankiness. But something has been unleashed. I am that guy now. My thirst for order has become unquenchable. At any given point, I'm a millisecond from being the person who huffs ‘Can everyone move down the carriage?’ when I get on the Tube. I never saw this coming, but I accept it.
To be fair, I don’t always use this power for evil. I saw some boys dicking around on a riverbank in a vaguely dangerous manner a couple of weeks ago, so I shouted ‘careful lads’ at them and probably saved their lives. Until I had kids I would have kept quiet – worried, perhaps, that they’d stab me or call me a paedophile – and let them drown. But now I am secure in my knowledge that I am a figure to be respected and feared in equal measure. I am Everyone’s Dad, and it feels good.
At least it feels good for now. Inevitably, in the next week or two, I’ll call a seven-year-old soft play interloper a little shit within their parents’ earshot and be beaten to death with a flip-flop next to a branch of Debenhams. But that’s fine. For at least I will have died knowing it was for a just and noble cause.
