The reopening of restaurants and theme parks that have had little or no revenue for a while has meant that you can now go to these places and feel as if you’re doing your civic duty. We are currently getting takeaways, going out to eat, taking days out, all the while feeling as if we’re doing our bit to get the economy going again. It’s the first time I have felt truly proud of myself since I did my bit for the NHS by clapping at my front door for five minutes a week.
I think the fantasy was always that lockdown was going to be lifted and we would immediately return to normal life with a renewed enthusiasm for the joys of existence. We would hug waiters and bar staff and never take anything for granted again. The reality has been that we are staggering to normality slowly, which is of course the right choice, but it does mean that we are currently going to weird, post-apocalyptic versions of the places we used to visit.
It was with a smug sense of social responsibility, and a desperation to get our kids off screens, that we decided to go to a farm park last weekend. We normally take a picnic, and that’s the main reason I agreed to go. When we arrived, all I could think about was when it would be time for our picnic, and afterwards all I could think about was how annoyed I was that we finished our picnic so soon. The kids loved the place, however, and I cannot tell you how lovely it was to spend quality time watching them not wait long enough on a slide, smash into another kid and then have to apologise to their judgmental parents.
It was closer to normal than we expected it to be, most of it being outdoors, so there was no rage building up to the point that you fantasise about stapling a mask to the faces of people who refuse to wear them. Of course, you had the horrible taped-off areas saying “COVID CLOSED”, which made the farm park feel a bit like Chernobyl with goats.
I can’t help feeling sorry for the kids, as these weird few months have taken up a bigger proportion of their lives than ours.
That was all forgotten when we got to the pigs, animals that continuously surprise you by always being bigger than you think they are going to be. There were piglets running about, which the kids found adorable, as did we until one of my children noticed a piglet quite aggressively cuddling one of the others. For some reason, my wife and I assumed this couldn’t be anything more than playfulness, pausing to see what happened next, like rubberneckers at a car crash.
We waited long enough to discover that incest isn’t as much of a social taboo for pigs as it is for humans, and spent the next half an hour fielding questions of nuclear-level awkwardness from the children, mainly because of the volume at which they were asking them. When a stranger walks past to hear your son say: “Is it OK for brothers to have sex with each other?”, you actually feel the need to stop them, so you can give them the backstory.
The true joy occurred, however, when we discovered the petting section was closed. Not only did I not have to contend with my continuing ethical discomfort about animal groping, we would not have to scream at the kids for repeatedly running to touch a guinea pig immediately after you’ve washed their hands for the eighth time. I found myself hoping that farm parks might be the one thing they decide to keep the same, when all this does come to an end. They just need to hide the horny piglets .
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