The purgatory of soft play

Are you familiar with the child-focused phenomenon generally known as soft play? Often located in the windowless recesses of garden centres with an innocent-sounding name like ‘Snakes and Ladders’, these are compounds dedicated to the frenetic, ergonomic joy of children – assault courses for mites, with slides, chutes, ball baths and various dangling hazards all swathed in gaudy soft foam-wrapped plastic.

On paper, soft play sounds like fun: what could be more enjoyable than watching your tiny ones zipping gleefully down slides in an ultra-safe environment, one where there’s even compulsory armbands for accompanying adults and locked doors to keep out perverts? What’s more, it’s an environment where your little ones are not actually clinging on to you bodily or asking for anything: they are free, happy and sated, and best of all they are burning off energy, so helping to hasten sleep.

But it’s not as simple as that, because children, particularly when they’re young, need your help to navigate the slides and the tunnels. You have to play with them, and much as you might prefer to drink a coffee, pop on some sound-cancelling headphones and read the paper, they simply can’t be left to get on with it. And this is where the purgatory of soft play begins.

As an adult you enter the netted enclosure at your peril because – know this – you’ll be lucky to escape without a visit to the chiropractor. That’s because there are no second places in the soft play Olympiad – it’s a physical assault course that separates the men from the boys. The boys bend, duck, scamper and laugh; the men creak, stumble, groan – and invariably scalp themselves.

The most egregious example of soft play I’ve found so far is on Clacton Pier. It is an enormous multi-layered temple to childhood effervescence – a Boschian cage of so many toddlers, mites and under-tens haring about that you can imagine that when the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang dreams, this is what he dreams of. And in this vast aviary of screeching minors, every soft surface is infused with in the residue of countless coughs, sneezes, drool and probably worse.

First, though, there’s the noise. It approaches levels not seen since Concorde last swooped over suburbia, but the pent-up wailing and shrieking of several hundred hysterical children, all revved up on Tizer and Smarties, is more a phonic doom than sonic boom.

Next comes the quiet reek of body odour emanating from pursuing parents – parents attempting to keep up with their little ones in a labyrinth too small for them; parents catching what little remains of their hair on the hard plastic ceilings of chutes, or swearing from friction burns off the slides, or as they stub their toes, or slip and fall on compressing sloping cushioned surfaces designed for people a tenth of the weight. As I said, you’ll be lucky to emerge without having to immediately visit a chiropractor.

One secret to surviving soft play is to begin at once to teach your children a loop, one preferably including a slide or two, which can be subtly drilled into them. Then you might be able to slip away, by stages, leaving them to get on with it, once they’re confident with it. ‘Do that again,’ you can wheeze, looking up from work emails on your phone. ‘Amazing! Go on! Do it again, faster!’

Of course, soft play is not all bad – it’s a sure-fire way of topping up young children’s immunity in preparation for nursery and school. An hour in ‘Pirate Pete’s’ or the ‘Playbarn’ and your little bundle of joy will emerge fully dosed-up with chicken pox or something else useful to get over and done with. That’s the bright side. But then there’s also your own immunity to consider, and depending on your age, chances are it isn’t as good as your five-year-old’s. What’s for certain is that when you do emerge from the enclosure, you will feel broken, used up, like a contestant on SAS: Who Dares Wins.

For a rest you can order lunch – even though you know it will probably be awful, coming from a diabetes kitchen where a green salad is regarded with the kind of suspicion that early hominids reserved for lightning. Lunch, also, is the moment when the cherub in the high-chair at the next table turns to you, half way through your tuna mayonnaise sandwich, and expectorates so hard she blows the Wotsits off your paper plate. There’s so much snot on her face, she reminds you of a virus-loaded, diseased monkey from a horror film. You know immediately that you’ve got a few days off work coming, like it or not, and your only hope is that somehow you don’t give it to the kids too, or it somehow skips you all entirely and goes straight to the wife.

This is when soft play despair really kicks in, as the sugar from the inevitable bun wears off, when you look around the room at the other mums and dads. Just like you, in all probability, they’re a good two stone heavier than they used to be. A lot of them will be in tracksuits, though few will have troubled a running track for years, possibly decades. There’s a lot of hair recession going on. Everyone looks tired, wraithlike – yet are too old to be cast as junior doctors by the BBC drama department. In that moment you realise that if these guys were Darwin’s finches then their days of shaking their tail feathers are long behind them.

And that’s when soft play crushes you. This lot are a mirror of you, and all this comes raining down on you as you nurse a sprained ankle. You realise that in evolutionary terms you’ve done your bit and now it’s just a question of babysitting until time’s up. Which is why the cheery, brightly coloured, squishy kids’ fantasia is purgatorial. Because soft play is where youth goes to die. Your youth. It’s a midlife crisis in primary colours, with Wotsits on the side covered in another child’s snot. It’s where you realise that the future equals grey hair, if you still have any, obesity if you’re not obese already, dicky hips, and an even blander, more regimented existence of child-worship and subservience – because after soft play come the taxi driving years.

So you smile at the mum with the kid who coughs like a Triffid with bronchitis and you reach for another Wotsit. Now you need to focus on how to extricate your postprandial children before the chips and burger-induced slump wears off, and then you need to remember to buy more Beechams Powders on the way home. They are essential and do wonders for gin.