When did it become a tradition to organise expensive birthday treats for your children? I don’t want to sound like a character in Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch, but when I was a boy the most I could hope for on my birthday was a quick game of football with my dad in Highgate Woods. It would have been completely unthinkable for my parents to actually organise a party for me, complete with an entertainer.
Nowadays, any celebration that costs less than £200 is considered child cruelty. And before anyone tells me to ‘check my privilege’, I don’t think this phenomenon is confined to the well off. On the contrary, my guess is that the further you travel down the social scale, the more lavish the children’s birthday parties are. It’s probably only at the very top of the pyramid — in some ageing Duke’s stately home — that kids are still fobbed off with a ticket to the Odeon and a bag of Maltesers.
Which is how I found myself driving to Cadbury World on Fred’s sixth birthday last Saturday. Mercifully, he was only allowed to bring one friend, but the expense was still off the charts. My children thought the £10.95 entrance fee was the bargain of the century because as they understood it, they’d be able to eat as much chocolate as they liked. Consequently, my offer to give them each £10.95, thereby avoiding the expense and inconvenience of driving to the West Midlands, fell on deaf ears.
The first thing you notice on arriving at Cadbury World is how fat the other punters are. Hardly surprising, given that the entire place is a shrine to cheap chocolate, but you’d think the visitors would look at each other and the penny would drop. Aha! So it’s all the chocolate I’ve been eating that’s caused me to become grotesquely fat, given me diabetes and left me unable to walk ten yards without getting out of breath. But no. Like my children, their main focus from the moment they arrived was getting their hands on as much free chocolate as possible.
Things started well from that point of view. As we began the tour of the factory, an old lady dressed from head to toe in Cadbury’s purple handed us each a Crunchie and a Curly Wurly. We then had to endure a lot of corporate PR about what marvellous employers the original Cadbury brothers were, introducing health and pension benefits in the 19th century, before being handed a tiny plastic cup containing liquid chocolate. At this point, the quid pro quo became clear: if you listen to us telling you what a great company this is, we’ll reward you with free chocolate. Except it’s not free because we’d all paid to be there. (It’s £14.95 for adults.)
The highlight for me was an archive exhibit about two thirds of the way through where the dads could linger and watch a succession of Flake adverts featuring various ‘supermodels’ wrapping their lips around Flakes in the most suggestive way possible. At one point, I got so carried away I started singing along to the music: ‘Only the crumbliest, flakiest chocolate…’ This immediately brought forth a scowl from my nine-year-old daughter: ‘Dad! You’re so embarrassing.’
To be fair, there’s one more ‘attraction’, a sort of prefab building in the car park called ‘Essence’. This involves sitting in one of those cinemas where the seats vibrate and steam is piped in, except instead of reliving the Battle of Britain (see the Royal Air Force Museum in Hendon, an altogether better bet) it’s another tribute to the Cadbury brothers. This time we see them ‘inventing’ milk chocolate, which I expect the Swiss would have something to say about. You’re then presented with another cup of liquid chocolate and sent on your way.
Afterwards, Caroline and I lingered in the playground in the hope that the kids would burn off some of that sugar-fuelled energy before the drive home. The centrepiece of the playground was a large, tubular slide — in Cadbury’s purple, naturally — and I hoped it would keep the children amused for 15 minutes. But no. As soon as they started playing on it, some fat kid got stuck halfway down, causing a tailback that required several adults to dismantle.
I’m not a health fascist, but I hope the current owners of Cadbury are donating a lot of money to the NHS, because consumers of their products must be costing the taxpayer a fortune.
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