Glowing

I am so sunburned I am bright pink.

Actually we are all bright pink, especially poor ginger Lucy. We look just like British people on their holidays.

I can feel my face glowing as I write.

It has been the most splendid day.

It was the Day of the Pleasure Beach. This was the exciting bit of our holiday. We were so determined to do this that we actually booked it in advance, and it has been worth the wait.

Of course we used to go to the Pleasure Beach all of the time. When the children were small we used to have annual passes. If you bought them in September of the year before, the park did a huge discount, and you could go all year for three hundred quid for all of us. This sounds like an awful lot, but actually it is the cost of two day visits, and so we thought probably it would be worth it, and it was.

It was especially worth it, because the children’s general level of peculiarity meant that neither of them could bear a whole day in the park all at once. We used to go every week, have an hour playing on the rides, take them ice skating and then go home. Lucy liked ice skating very much, and was pretty good. As you know now, she did not, in the end, grow up to be a showgirl, although she might have done if we had lived in Blackpool and not the Lake District.

At the time an hour was all that either of them could bear. The excitement and the queues and the noise sent both of them into a state of flappy anxiety, although they loved being there better than anything else in the world, and so we had lots of short, predictable visits, which was ace.

Because of that we all got to know Blackpool Pleasure Beach very well indeed. We still know it very well indeed, although lots of things are different.

The main thing that is different is that the children are now older.

Oliver is now tall enough to go on every single ride, and so he did. Mark was very relieved about this, because Lucy has always had a passion for terrifying roller coasters, and up until now Mark has been the misfortunate parent obliged to accompany her. Oliver and I hung about waiting at the bottom, Oliver because he was too small to ride, and me because I was too cowardly.

Now Oliver can ride with her, and after a while Mark and I retired to the champagne bar whilst the two of them agitated their digestive systems into a state of crisis.

They went on all of the very biggest roller coasters. We waved and gasped as they thundered past, and thought happily, as we drank our champagne, how lovely it was that they were both grown up.

We did not sit out everything. We went on the River Caves ride, which is my favourite, and takes you on a boat trip around the world as it ought to be and isn’t, full of inscrutable Orientals and mysterious Egyptians and savage cavemen and ruined jungle temples full of jerkily wagging monkeys.

We went on the Grand National, which is a race between two roller coasters, and of course we knew that the right hand side one always wins, so we went on that one. It is a very old ride, and almost rattled our teeth out, but it was ace anyway.

The children persuaded me to go on a truly horrible experience which involved perching on a seat which was then shot about sixty feet into the air only to plummet back down again. It repeated this a couple of times, which I knew even though I had my eyes tightly closed. I felt very wobbly afterwards and in need  of some doughnuts to recuperate.

The Chinese Puzzle maze was closed, to my great disappointment, because of the privet hedges being in flower, and because it was once Oliver’s favourite, from the days when he was too young to like excitement.

We went on the Derby Day roundabout, which is jolly fast and scary, and the Wallace and Grommit ride, and even though I know about the Were Rabbit it still made me jump. We creaked round the Alice In Wonderland ride which has not changed in the smallest detail since I was five, and ended the day on a speedy and fearsome experience called the Avalanche, which was opened by Eddie The Eagle and seemed to be attempting to recreate his only-just-death-defying adventures.

By the time we staggered back we were all burned to a crisp and starving.

We ate the most colossal dinner and eventually ambled off down to the beach with the dogs, for a cooling swim as the sun was setting.

The water is jolly warm, even though it is Blackpool, at least in comparison to Scotland last week. We sloshed about and splashed one another whilst the dogs belted up and down the beach barking at us to come out.

We staggered saltily up the beach as the darkness crept across the sea, and dressed in the camper van before a last walk down to the pier for a middle-of-the-night ice cream.

I have included a picture.

It is midnight. We have eaten our ice creams and we are all sitting reading as we wait our turns for the shower.

Blackpool is just wonderful.