The seasonal theme for the holiday today has been ice skating.
Blackpool has got a brilliant ice rink, the ice is supposed to be the best in the country, and so when we are here we skate.
We are all indifferent ice skaters, except Oliver, who is too scared to be anything other than rubbish, and Lucy, who is really good.
Several years ago, before she went off to boarding school, we used to come here and skate a lot. Lucy absolutely loved it. The chorus girls from the show earn extra pocket money teaching enthusiastic small girls to skate, and Lucy’s teacher told us that she could possibly become really good, with lots of practice and hard work, and would she like to audition for upcoming shows.
This threw us into a dilemma: should we encourage her to skate and spend half our lives patiently hanging about Blackpool until she hatched into a brilliantly-coloured showgirl: or dispatch her off to her girls’ school nunnery until she had achieved some examination passes and a proper BBC accent.
Of course you know the choice we all made in the end, and today we laughed about the road almost-taken, because now we don’t all skate all the time we are much more comfortably fat and idle, and a morning at the ice rink left us all staggering around nursing aching legs and feet.
In consequence of having turned all of our muscles to jelly, we thought we would have a gentler day of it. We cycled across to the beach, where we spent the afternoon paddling and building sand castles, and debating the hot topic of the day.
On everybody’s mind was that Number One Daughter had fallen in love with Fat White Poopy. Having first thought that nobody but us could love it, in the end its ridiculous tufts of fur became gloriously soft, and the smudges around its face evened out until it looked adorably cute instead of pink eyed and ugly, and Number One daughter loved it.
This caused a crisis of indecision, because we had all come to think of it as our own, and an agonising couple of hours passed until we all thought that perhaps we could bear to let it go and live with them.
We all felt all the virtue of noble self sacrifice then, and Oliver said that he supposed loving the last remaining poopy and keeping it would be like loving the last one to be chosen for the football team at school. We all knew how that felt, so we thought we would try and love that one instead, I will let you know how it works out.
We spent the evening at the Hot Ice show.
This was brilliant.
Having spent the morning wobbling unsteadily around the rink and practising lemons and crossovers until our feet hurt, we were in exactly the right frame of mind to appreciate the massive cleverness of anybody who can skate backwards around the ice rink whilst carrying a girl above his head. We clapped and cheered and were lost in admiration, especially for the chap who did somersaults on the ice. I have done one or two of those, but with less grace and a considerably more painful landing.
We cycled back to the hotel in the dark and compared sunburn, after three days we have all finally gone pink and look like real Blackpool visitors, with sunburn, fake tattoos and nicely rounded tummies.
We are going home tomorrow.
Perhaps it is just as well.
