"It's eating my soul"

The title of this post is the text message I sent in response to the Other Half's enquiry as to how my day at Local Theme Park* with Small Person and my mother was going.

It was doomed to failure from the start, for any number of reasons. Small Person is pathologically afraid of theme parks. My mother is insane beyond any hope of redemption. I may or may not have a borderline personality disorder and very poor coping skills (this intensifies in my mother's company). Pleasureless Hills is unremittingly shit.

For those who are fortunate enough never to have been there, let me try and summarise the shitness of Pleasureless Hills. It's fucking rubbish. Its main clientele are overspill freaks from the nearby "holiday" towns of Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft. Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft are where people who can't afford to go to Blackpool go on holiday. Lowestoft is in the third world, and Yarmouth is like a convention for people with misshapen heads. And they all go to fucking Pleasureless Hills for a fun day out. It's a fabulous, glittering jewel in the bleak landscape of darkest Suffolk. If you spent your formative years being beaten by feral nuns in an eastern European orphanage, that is. If you are anything resembling mentally stable, it's arse-clenchingly bad.

And what a day we had.

Small Person dissolved into hiccupy tears every time I suggested going on a ride that was any more hardcore than the Tweenies car outside our local Tesco. She wept hopeless, resigned tears at the very thought of the Pirate Ship, the Rattlesnake, the Teacups....you get the idea. She was scared of the fucking steps of the helter skelter. My patience had been stretched to the limit by our first activity, which was a boat ride through a shed with some shit pirate cutouts in it, accompanied by a soundtrack of my mother carping incessantly about not having been given any 3D glasses at the outset (well it said we would get some, and now there's a sign telling us to put them on, and we haven't got any, but it said we would get some, and now there's a sign telling us to put them SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP). I think it was supposed to be scary, but it probably have helped the atmosphere slightly if they'd remembered to switch the overhead fluorescents off. It was about as scary as our garage. It could only get worse.

And boy, did it.

I am deeply, irrationally afraid of cable cars. So, the minute the safety bar clicked into place on the chairlift ride across the park, I started hyperventilating and imagining our impending violent deaths. It inched the quarter mile from one circle of hell to the other, as my mind treated me to endless cutaway shots of that cable car crash in the highlands of Scotland a few weeks ago, and Small Person patted my leg comfortingly and told me not to worry. Never again, my friends. Never again.

By this time I had dropped any pretence of having a good time, and was just plain ignoring my mother who was wandering around like a mental patient, a bit sort of glassy eyed and without any apparent idea of where we were or why we were there in the first place. Driving. Me. Mad. I don't know why I agree to go anywhere with the woman, since after five minutes in her company I want to point, shout "look over there!!" and run the other way. I was at the stage of checking the time every five minutes and sort of wishing the chairlift had crashed.

We had a lovely lunch at the Merry Mariner restaurant (blank-faced, dead-eyed staff, plastic plates and cutlery, very loud rave music, my mother dancing at the jacket potato servery), and managed to get one more ride in before my personal god took pity on me and opened the heavens. Oh dear, I said. It doesn't look as if it's going to stop. Do you think we should call it a day?

Total cost for three hours misery? Forty one quid, and irreversible damage to my psyche. Save yourselves. Avoid Pleasureless Hills like the fucking plague. And never, ever go anywhere with my mother.

* The name has been changed to protect the innocent. Namely me, as I am convinced that my mother will google the real name, find this blog and write me out of her will. And I need the money. Please work with me on this.

DISCLAIMER:

I was in a very bad mood today owing to spending time with my mother, who has the ability to induce furniture-biting frustration in me in a very short space of time. Some of you might really like it at Pleasureless Hills. Maybe you like to holiday in Great Yarmouth. Maybe you even live there. I'm not judging you - I'm venting.

That is all.