A Fairground Attraction

On Saturday we visited the Whitehaven Festival, whilst staying with friends in Cumbria.  As we joined the merry throng of people enjoying all the fun of the fair, we were blissfully ignorant of the fear and danger that lurked around every corner…

No, not Louis Walsh (although seeing him pose for cheesy photos was terrifying enough).  It was actually the moment we chose to take our eldest two on the Waltzers that events turned into the stuff of nightmares…

Our smug expressions of parents giving their children a special treat slowly turned to horror as J began to turn a nasty shade of puce and with panicked eyes clamped his hand over his mouth.  As I waited nervously for a face full of warm vomit, M’s face was simultaneously transforming from one of giddy excitement to one of sheer, unadulterated terror.

‘Scream if you want to go faster!’ yelled the operator.  ‘I’m going to be sick!’ screamed J.  ‘I can’t hear you!’ the operator bantered.  ‘I don’t like it!’ wailed M.  The more that people screamed in pant-wetting fear, the faster it went.

After what seemed like an eternity the ride stopped and we staggered out unsteadily, our decidedly green-looking eight year old still with his hand firmly over his mouth and our four year old sobbing terrified tears.

When their hysteria finally abated we left them in the Funhouse (hoping they’d forget their trauma) under the supervision of our friends whilst we took our (as yet) unscathed toddler on this innocuous looking inflatable slide, hoping to redeem ourselves.

Z’s little face lit up as we approached and we had visions of him happily scampering up the steps, sliding down easily and then begging, ‘Again?’ but this was our family so it was obviously never going to be that easy.

When it became apparent that the steps were too steep for Z, I reluctantly slipped off my sandals next to the sign that read ‘Please leave your shoes (and your dignity) here’.  Not really, but it may as well have.  I climbed with the sinking feeling that he would want me to go down with him.  I was wearing a maxi dress.  It was never going to end well.

With a case for the Trades Description Act, it turned out the ‘slide’ wasn’t the least bit ‘slidy’.  This, in conjunction with a long, billowy dress, a toddler and gravity, was blatantly a disaster waiting to happen.  But, you’ve got to understand, I JUST WANTED TO MAKE MY CHILD HAPPY.

My doubts were intensified when I had to violently bounce to start us ‘sliding’ and we moved about ten centimetres before stopping abruptly.  I bounced some more, my dress hitching up dangerously by the second as we edged forward again.  In this painfully slow fashion we bounced and bumped our way to the bottom with my modesty just about intact.

In hindsight we should have cut our losses at this point…but we’d paid for three goes and Z had, for some bizarre reason, enjoyed the first one.

The second time, determined we would actually ‘slide’ down the slide, I was, shall we say, a little ‘over-zealous’?  The momentum of my undignified bouncing carried us forward and we began to teeter forward,  Z going head-first.  I grabbed him…and as I let go of my dress, all hell let loose.

As gravity carried us forward, my dress stayed stubbornly where it was, thus moving it towards the region of my armpits as we continued to tumble down the slide.  My knickers, meeting resistance with the rough plastic, started to wedge further and further up my bum, to the point where I could have extracted them from my mouth like a long hanky at an alternative magic show.

They soon resembled tooth floss and, by so transforming, exposed the generous surface area of my arse to the abrasive plastic.  Remember the friction burns you used to get slipping down those rough ropes in gym class at school?  Well at least that was only your hands.  This time it was a soft arse cheek on one side and the tender, delicate ‘undercarriage’ bit that really hurts when you have your bikini line waxed on the other.

I screamed, Z cried and as my dress rode up to my waist I flashed my fanny to a random man waiting at the bottom.  Then, as my grand finale when I scrambled to cover my dignity…I kneed my toddler in the head.  Unsurprisingly, he didn’t want his third turn.

Humiliation complete, I leapt up and adjusted my dress. Then, aware that we’d become a fairground attraction in our own right, I hobbled off, carrying my potentially-concussed toddler to meet our other two emotionally scarred children with not one but TWO sets of red, burning cheeks…

Is this a ‘magic moment’? It’s a ‘moment’, that’s for sure. The lovely Jaime at The Oliver’s Madhouse said to include it though so who am I to argue?