When Hell freezes over....

I am in need of a large medicinal brandy! I have just returned from a child's birthday party....I have survived, with all limbs currently intact...although I may loose a few toes to frostbite at some future point!

These days, birthday parties are somewhat different affairs to the parties of my youth. Then, we would all gather at some friends house, in party dresses and the boys would have shirts and trousers. We would eat jelly and ice-cream, sausages on sticks and devour silver foil hedgehogs full of pineapple and cheese. We would play pass the parcel, hide and seek, pin the tail on the donkey and musical chairs. And come home clutching a sliver of birthday cake, wrapped in a napkin.

But things have changed....Nowadays, a party at some tourist attraction or fast food restaurant is expected. There are, needless to say, a plethora of indoor 'soft play' attractions down here in tourist central, all of whom are more than happy to liberate locals of their cash in the name of child entertainment. And the worst of these....is Hell Zone! (Names have been changed, so that I may bitch to my hearts content)

Now, I should point out before, they sue me, that there is absolutely nothing wrong with Hell Zone, from a child's perspective, or even some parents; it has a fully licensed bar, for instance. It is a vast, warehouse of a building, that would put most aircraft hangers to shame, and stuffed full with all manner of slides, ball pools, climbing frames and soft squishy things in hideously bright colours, that children seem to love.....and I hate every last inch of it!

Dude, on the other hand, loves it and so does young Master H McGregor and it was his birthday! Now we had been planning on a trip to Launceston, to a similar establishment that also includes a cuddle farm. Mrs McGregor and I had cunning plans of abandoning the boys in the soft play area, whilst we snuck off to ooh/aah over lambs and bunnies (not very goth I know, but there might have been a black lamb or bunny. Goths have fluffy moments too you know!). However, the demise of Mrs McGregor's car earlier this week and the uncertain health of mine led to a rethink.....young Master H chose Hell Zone and our fates were sealed.

Survival kit: Paper, Nicotene, Caffine, Ear Plugs & Twitter

The thought of abandoning my child with Mrs McGregor and doing a runner did cross my mind, but that would have been cruel and unusual punishment for a Lady who goes out of her way to help me. And so I resigned myself to a couple of hours of torment. I thought that I had my survival kit all worked out.....I was wrong!

The first problem with Hell Zone is the noise. Anybody who talks about the delightful sound of children playing, is a certifiable lunatic in my humble opinion. The battle cries of the young offspring of our species sound like the cries of deranged, feral banshees. In the vast, cavernous reaches of Hell Zone, these cries are magnified to something approaching the take off noise of a commercial airliner. And the noise is constant....it is all very well to be surrounded by a few noisy children, but when you find yourself surrounded by thousands....hundreds....OK, dozens of the little blighters, all bellowing for each others attention; you slowly begin to lose the will to live. Compound this with piped music from the 'popular' genre and you find yourself unable to concentrate on the written word and have to shout to make yourself heard to the person sitting next to you. To add to that misery today, somebodies 'little darling' set the fire alarms off and 45 minutes of various discordant 'whoo whoos' and bells resulted. To compensate for this noise, the staff turned up the music...while all of us helplessly tried to remember the little British Sign Language that we knew (turns out that was somewhere between very little and bugger all!)

Another small problem with Hell Zone is ambient temperature. I should have suspected something when I saw Mr McGregor senior arriving with his electric scooter, snuggled under a mountain of blankets. Apparently 'sub-arctic' was the level that the heating had been set at, the play area itself had been set to 'frigid', but I didn't dare enter that section of the building....that's where the wild things live! Of course, the best kind of seating for an indoor refrigerator is metal....do not lick under any circumstances!! And within fifteen minutes I found myself unable to feel any of my extremities. Thankfully, Mr McGregor senior, who is aware of my physical problems, had brought a few extra heating methods to spare. Without the toastie foot warmers, I feel I would have lost a few toes...I stupidly declined the spare hot water bottle and blanket...vanity bites back again!!

Mrs McGregor poses so I can take
 surreptitious photo of woman on Kindle

My final problem with Hell Zone is with relativity....today I lost 3 hours of my life that I will never get back again, But I actually felt as if I spent six months doing hard time in a Siberian gulag (providing that hard time consisted of chatting about how everybody else in the place was on a laptop, Kindle or I Pad, the difficulty of finding clothes for tall people, how can you make cheesy chips taste like chips with no cheese, aren't these alarms annoying and trying to explain Twitter without saying 'just because'). How many times I looked at my watch and thought 'it must be broken', I have no idea....

There was, however, an interesting high point... Number 2 son, who did not accompany us, but rather stayed at home to watch DVDs with his girlfriend. Foolishly put on Facebook that his girlfriend's mother would be at Hell Zone at the same time as myself....then young Master Gee gave her a description of me...Well sorry son, we met and we talked...about you (all nice things though....I did start to wonder if she was talking about the right boy?????)

And so, I am snugly back at home. I have survived my morning and afternoon at Hell Zone and I now just have to hope that Dude never gets invited to another party there ever again.....some hope!