I had forgotten how difficult it is to be intoxicated in a foreign language.
Of course everybody in Disneyland speaks every language in the world, and seems to be happy to do so for minimum wage, but it is a point of bloody-mindedness with me to speak French, since I am here. This works better when I am sober.
The children wanted to go and loaf about in the bedroom after dinner tonight, so Mark and I went down to what used to be the Piano Bar and is now Cafe Fantasia, and is the scene of many previous intoxications, as I think I may have mentioned in earlier entries.
Regrettably, whilst we were waiting to go in, one of the waiters pointed to me and said: “I remember you! You have been here before, Madame.”
I tell you this as a warning that the world is not an anonymous place, and that waiters have a better memory than taxi drivers, especially when it comes to badly behaved elderly ladies.
We had piña colada, which is a drink upon which I would be happy to subsist for the rest of my life. I like cocktails as a general principle, especially the way they are served in Disneyland, with bamboo cocktail sticks and cherries soaked in brandy, and beautiful colours and lovely glasses. We should not have gone to the bar at all, especially since we had a bottle of wine with lunch and another with dinner, and when one thinks of Disneyland, the thought which immediately comes to mind should not be ‘what a marvellous place to become drunk’.
It is, though.
Once again, we have had a splendid day. We have ridden on a space ship, which has become a different space ship since Disney bought Star Wars. We have whizzed around being rats in a Parisian kitchen, and ridden on horses on the roundabout, which is always a personal favourite. We have shot Zurg, who is Buzz Lightyear’s personal nemesis, and we have ridden through an exploding oil tanker and a flash flood.
We are jolly tired now.
We are exhausted tired. Lucy opted for a long soak in the bath tonight. Oliver tried to opt for going to bed grubby, but was overruled by the rest of the family, who all have an opinion on his state of cleanliness. We have eaten a great deal more than is good for us, and drunk more than that.
A bottle of wine is not quite so disgraceful now that Lucy drinks some of it, but it is disgraceful enough. Lucy is very pleased to be spending her Easter holidays drinking too much in Disneyland, because she has GCSEs next term and everybody else in her class had planned to spend the holiday sitting in their bedroom alternately crying and revising.
We did give her the option of doing that instead, but obviously she declined. I am glad she did, because I think a jolly good break will be much better for her exam capabilities than wrapping herself in her duvet and feeling guilty about spending all of Easter secretly watching YouTube.
It is brilliant for all of us. Apart from struggling to stay awake, we are all starting to feel ace. This might be because of the sunshine. I have become an undignified shade of bright pink. This is not terribly middle-class, but I don’t care. I have got enough Vitamin D to see me through the whole summer, I should think. We are sleepy and happy and life is good. Oliver was too tired to be able to eat his dinner. He was served chocolate in the shape of a jigsaw with Tinker Bell on it. It had six pieced. He was too tired to work it out.
That’s the way holidays should be.
