By As a person, I have a natural tendency to avoid. If something scares me, or bores me, or generally involves going outside and interacting with stuff, my overriding instinct is to sack it off and eat Doritos on my sofa.
But once you become a parent, this no longer flies. You want your children to be open-minded and curious. You want them to be able to engage unafraid, to grab life by the throat. So for the last three and a half years, I’ve forced myself to be more adventurous. Because if my kids can see me tackle the world head-on, they’ll learn that nothing is insurmountable. Nothing is off limits.
Except funfairs. Funfairs can 100% fuck off.
I’m talking from experience. A couple of weeks ago the funfair came to town. My wife was working, so I decided to take the kids.The colours and the sounds and the smells would be a sensory overload for my children, I figured. It’d be like strolling through a kaleidoscope, a memory they’d cherish forever.
Turns out fairgrounds have changed. The stark adult reality of a travelling fairground is just infinite bleakness. The colours were sad and damp. The sounds were an equal-volume mixture of techno (playing out of time through three different speakers) and crying children. And the smell was dominated by a permanent low-level standing fog of sickly Berry Swirl vape smoke. But I pushed through anyway, the little one in a buggy and the big one trailing behind nonplussed.
A quick stocktake instantly identified all the unsuitable attractions – too high, too fast, too obviously cobbled together from flimsy off-brand East European Meccano – leaving just a pair of inflatable slides. What could possibly go wrong on a slide?
Everything, that’s what. After handing over a week’s wages for six minutes of access, I pointed the big one towards to a small, age-appropriate slide. Which he ignored in favour of its neighbour, a monumental five-storey sheer-drop nightmare of a thing. It was terrifying, but I let him do it anyway. He was being fearless, just like I’d taught him.
He climbed the steps, steep enough to require a guide rope. He reached the top. He saw me at the bottom. He smiled and waved. And then he looked down.
And this is when I learned that none of my efforts to look adventurous had rubbed off. Not in the slightest. Because this is the moment when my son point-blank refused to go down the slide. It was too high for him, too scary. He went to descend the steps, but they were also too high and too scary. He was stuck.
But that was fine. I could always coax him down. I’m his dad. He’d listen to me. “IT’S OK!”, I bellowed at this quivering pinprick stuck at the summit of an inflatable mountain. “JUST SIT DOWN! YOU CAN DO IT!” But he stood there, glued to the spot. “COME ON!” I yelled, “OR ELSE I’M GOING HOME WITHOUT YOU!” But nothing could shift him. Not encouragement, not coercion, not bribery or threats.
On and on it went. I was left with two options: either I keep handing over fistfuls of money every six minutes until they let the air out of the slide at the end of the night, or I climb up and get him. But I had my one-year-old with me, and I couldn’t fully rule out the possibility of him getting abducted while I was off grabbing the other one. So I did what anyone would do; I unclipped the baby and tucked him under my arm. If we were going to go down this slide, we were all going to go down together.
By the way, don’t ever do this. Those steps are too steep to safely climb one-handed, which makes your mind flash with potential local news headlines like WORLD’S WORST FATHER DIES ON OVERPRICED BALLOON and NEW WIDOW NEVER FORGIVES HUSBAND FOR DROPPING BABY DOWN INFLATABLE HILL. Taking a baby up a slide is for idiots.
Eventually, miraculously, I made it all the way to the top. I sat the big one down, grabbed the baby like they teach you in aeroplane safety videos, and flung all three of us down this (very high, very scary) slide at what I conservatively estimate was a trillion miles an hour.
Two seconds later, everything was a mess. I was frayed and sweating. The big one was scared and crying and bleeding from a friction burn on his hand. The little one, if I’ve done my maths right, had fully evacuated his bowels between take-off and landing. There and then I decided that I was never going to another fucking funfair as long as I lived. Fuck funfairs. Fuck them forever.
I got home broken and exhausted and filled with regret. My wife rushed to greet us, asking what the hell had happened. I didn’t want to explain that I’d endangered both of my children in a stupid macho quest for adventure. But then the big rushed up and hugged her. “DADDY RESCUED ME!” he yelled at my wife, beaming with gleeful disbelief.
So, fine, maybe we’ll do one more funfair.
