Cheap thrills
Jonathan Ray
My heart didn’t sink so much as plummet. Our family was gathering from Belfast, Brighton and Newcastle, with four nippers under four between us, and my cousin Hannah had decreed that the get-together was to be spent in Center Parcs, Sherwood Forest. Oh please not, I begged. As far as I was concerned, Center Parcs was where people who weekended in motorway service stations spent their holidays. I had seen the ghastly television ads of smug couples and their vile offspring cycling through sundappled woodland. ‘A place to dream’, says the tag-line. Oh, per-leeze. They can’t even spell its name right. It was pissing down when we arrived, and as we signed in at the log cabin with its forbidding barrier and dark woods behind it, I was convinced that we had arrived at an open prison or army base. I looked for the barbed wire perimeter and waited to be escorted in by a military policeman.
We had hired adjoining ‘units of accommodation’ and spent a merry hour or so trying to find them among the 825 other chalets hidden in the woods. We unloaded the cars and then spent another hilarious couple of hours searching for the equally well-obscured car parks before struggling to find our way back home in the teeming rain. Of course, we had forgotten to hire our bicycles and so off we trudged on another sodden hike. Gee, this was fun.
Our two-bedroom chalet was functional to the point of spartan and before we had even unpacked I was considering lodging an appeal against our three-night incarceration. On the face of things, it did seem an unduly harsh sentence. Ashley, whose 60th birthday we were celebrating, came round from next door, grinning from ear to ear. ‘Isn’t this great? We’re going to have such fun,’ he sighed. ‘Just open the wine, Ashley,’ muttered my wife, Marina, who can usually be relied upon to see the sunny side of things without recourse to alcohol.
That afternoon the girls told us we would all go swimming. I am a lousy swimmer and public swimming pools are my idea of hell, especially public swimming pools with palms and wave machines, such as we were promised. Four-year-old Ferdy took the same view. Like me, he had been in a strop since we arrived, in his case because two-year-old Ludo had nicked his treasured Thunderbird Two. Neither the promise of a biscuit nor a ride in the bicy cle-pulled buggy could sway him. ‘No swimming! No biscuits! No buggy! No ANYTHING!’ he roared. Attaboy! For a blissful moment I thought that we would both be put on potato-peeling and excused the swim.
The pool, or ‘Subtropical Swimming Paradise’ to give it its full title, was indeed hell, being packed, noisy and suffocatingly hot. I cheered up a notch, though, on realising that I was far from the fattest there, despite being at my heaviest. Shame, though, that I had left my gold necklace, bracelet and tattoos at home.
Ferdy decided that he did like swimming after all, and so after a cursory pad dle, I sloped off to the poolside bar, leaving the cousins gambolling in the water. It may have been the alcohol, it may have been the heat, but I suddenly had a eureka moment: we were together as a family, the children were happy and it was going to be all right. After the swim we chaps took the nippers on Freddy the Teddy’s picnic, while the wives went off for pre-booked massages. We had a hoot being shepherded through the trees following Freddy’s paw prints, and the children loved it. And I like to think that Ashley, Steve and I made an impression on the assembled mothers with our rendition of ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’. The girls beat us home and were already well into their second bottle. Anne, spaced out from her massage, had fallen off her bike and Hannah had managed to ride over and kill a squirrel, so fat, tame and trusting was it. Despite the grim weather we had a barbecue, but at least we didn’t set off the fire alarm, which seemed to be activated by even the faintest whiff of underdone toast. Indeed, one of the recurrent themes of the holiday was a piercing ‘beep-beep-beep’ from surrounding chalets followed by the sight of exasperated husbands opening and slamming chalet doors as wives flapped tea towels at kitchen ceilings.
Apparently there were 4,500 of us dotted around the woods during the weekend — not that you would have known it. Apart from the pool, nowhere seemed especially busy and over the next two days we found plenty to do with minimal queuing. We walked, golfed, sailed (Ashley capsizing spectacularly), played pool and snooker and exhausted ourselves running round the playgrounds. Being virtually car-free, cycling through the 450 acres of woods was a real pleasure. We cooked for ourselves and ate at home, apart from a very indifferent Sunday lunch at the ‘Country Club’, where we struggled to recover from the fact that they didn’t serve Bloody Marys. ‘We stock the vodka, sir, but not the tomato juice.’ The highlight for the children was the evening Owl Walk where, way past their bedtime, Ferdy and Noah learnt wide-eyed all about such birds and experienced a barn owl alighting on to their outstretched arms. They almost fainted with excitement.
By Monday morning I had long got over the feeling that I was in an open prison, only for a klaxon to sound through the woods to let us know that our time was up. Did I imagine it, or was there also a guard shouting ‘Raus! Raus!’?
Center Parcs ain’t as squeaky clean and chic as it looks in the brochure, but nor is it anywhere near as dire as I had feared. In fact we had a hugely enjoyable time and barely scratched the surface of the 180 (apparently) activities on offer. We will definitely be going back — once we’ve bought some lilac shell suits.
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