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Saturday, February 02, 2013

The novelist André Berthiaume once made this wise observation:

"We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin."

I know exactly what he means...


That elastic was so tight, I lost three layers of epidermis just getting the hat off. And don't get me started on the nose hairs. One tug on that cardboard moustache, and I looked like Daniella Westbrook at the British Soap Awards.

Anyhoo, as a survivor of one of Amelie's dressing-up games (she's like Gok Wan crossed with a Nazi), I decided to aid my mental and physical recovery by getting out of the house for a few hours today. Unfortunately the rest of my family insisted on coming with me. And telling me where to go. So at 11:30 this morning, Lisa, Amelie, Toby and I found ourselves at the Monkey Bizness indoor play centre in Lewes. Queuing outside in the cold.

We've been there a few times in the past year, and Amelie's often had the place to herself. Even when we started climbing the walls on a bank holiday, it wasn't unbearably crowded. But today it was packed. Not only did we have to stand in line outside, but they restricted our session to two hours.

Obviously the news that we couldn't spend all day in a giant warehouse surrounded by screaming kids wasn't greeted with sorrow by every member of the family, but Amelie was a bit disappointed. Fortunately she made the most of her time. Not by climbing on the equipment or going down the slide, but by counselling groups of three-year-olds in her private office...


That's Amelie on the right. The boys on the left are undergoing a mixture of group therapy and hero-worship. I don't know where she gets it from. Both Lisa and I were fairly shy, quiet children, but Amelie's the kind of girl who can walk into a room the size of an aircraft hangar, see scores of kids she doesn't know, and promptly march up to them and start talking. By the end of our session, she'd held court in that corner with about eight different boys. I'm not sure if she's sociable or just easy.

2 comments:

Phil's Mum said...

It IS slightly worrying that they were all boys!

Peter Chapman said...

'And then I told my mum, if I want a  cookie, then give me a damn cookie'