Alcoholics know that hell is denial, and there is plenty at Disneyland Paris in winter. This is a pleasure land risen from a field and everyone has after-party eyes, including the babies. The Disney hotels operate a predictable hierarchy: princesses at the top, Mexicans at the bottom. We, the Squeezed Middle, are at the Sequoia Lodge with Bambi, where I learn that I like canned birdsong, and that is fair. You don’t consume dream worlds, because that is not their nature. They consume you.
We stand in the Magic Kingdom and stare at Mickey Mouse-shaped food and a fake Bavarian castle – it’s Ludwig’s, not Sleeping Beauty’s – painted pink. Disney culture is impregnable: hence the fortress. It only needs – it only feeds on – itself. This is a coherent universe if you can take the food, and if you don’t mind worshipping an annoying mouse that acts as avatar for Walt – who even knows? In fact, the mouse cult is a dual cult, almost a schism. More people know Mickey, of course – preening Mickey, pure Id, or a twat, depending on your language – but Minnie fans are more ardent, tiny and female, and I love them.
Survival here is about logistics, like invading Russia. The street food – a slightly burnt cheese pretzel excepted – is repulsive. To eat in potentially better restaurants, you must book in advance, to avoid being at the mercy of the hamburger – I mean salt – restaurants at the Disney Village beyond the park gates, because people don’t just come to Disneyland Paris. They come to be near Disneyland Paris.
Then it’s Walt’s, a homage to Walt Disney on Main Street, the plywood Americana that is supposed to invoke Meet Me in St Louis, but for some reason reminds me of the general lack of access to birth control pre-mid-20th century. Walt’s is based on Walt’s childhood home, thrown up on Main Street like a repressed memory. It is very contained and formal – marble floors, flocked carpets, a grandfather clock – but there is a smallness to it, a stilted howl. There is a painting of Phantom Manor on the wall: it is in no way subtle. There are photographs of Walt on every surface – Walt with Mickey, Walt with an Oscar, Walt by a hole – but to me it feels like the restaurant of All the Childhood Trauma, and it tastes like it too.
Mickey and Minnie walk through, dressed as medieval rulers, posing for selfies and nodding at toddlers, who respond like people setting themselves on fire
I want to eat in Captain Jack’s restaurant, but I don’t know this until I am inside the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. We go on the boat in the – what? – shed and – a restaurant! It has lanterns and bewildered diners – bewildered by themselves? And I think that the weirdest thing about modern civilisation isn’t that it made the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. It is that people will watch the Pirates of the Caribbean ride from a restaurant in a shed. Then we go to the Agrabah Café Restaurant. It is a fake souk with cartoons from Aladdin on the walls. The food – mezze, merguez, couscous, tabbouleh from the salad bar – is pretty good, as if the chef, who is almost certainly a Muslim, is manifesting a one-man defence of the culinary arts in France, and where they are most threatened. People fall on Agrabah, because the alternative is salt beyond the gate.
It is a set menu, and it is as bad as Langan’s Brasserie, a restaurant designed so an alcoholic – Peter Langan – didn’t have to go home, ever. I have a Waldorf salad, a chilli con carne and a lemon cheesecake in the shape of Mickey’s head. My son has a chicken pot pie, a mac and cheddar cheese and a Flower Street Sundae in the shape of Mickey’s head. It is all inedible, loveless – who knew a tomato could feel claustrophobic?
The final restaurant is the Royal Banquet inside the Disneyland Hotel: the über-hotel, if you can handle this much vulva pink. It straddles the park entrance: the Some Like It Hot hotel but pink, with Mickey’s face written in topiary outside. After three days in Disneyland and a lifetime in journalism, I find Mickey hopelessly over-exposed. Inside, it is indescribable in the way of Donald Trump. Everything is oversized: ceilings are higher, corridors longer, great rooms greater. This is postwar America in pink, the doctrine of more, and it is more expensive than Claridge’s.
The design is never-happened medieval and the 1990s: brown and beige; carpet and glass; random thrones, just in case you need them. I think everyone here is a megalomaniac; every day a wedding day. Uneasy is the head that wears the crown? Not here. Glass slippers cost €6,900, are uglier than avarice and sit in recesses. The art is Disney art, self-replicating, self-digesting: cartoons of horses, an armadillo, a moose.
The buffet wants to project something: all your dreams come true. This is done with piles. The pile of shrimps is so big it is actively frightening: so many eyes! There is a vast beef roast – maybe rump, maybe sirloin; chicken poached in wine; a mezze having a panic attack; macaroni cheese; sea bream; something unpleasant with bulgur wheat.
I pile my plate – I have a weird Sunday lunch, which would be OK if I didn’t add hash browns, but I do – and wait for assault from the Disney pantheon. Mickey and Minnie walk through, dressed as medieval rulers, posing for selfies and nodding at toddlers, who respond like people setting themselves on fire. Are they Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine? Or Edward II and Isabella? (In this telling Mickey ends up with a red-hot poker up his gilded arse.) I don’t know why my son is dressed in homage to a Parisian New Wave intellectual in a black polo-neck, but he looks ridiculous next to Donald Duck.
The food looks better than it tastes, but is styled as a rainbow. The puddings are for a childhood dream of glut: red roses, macaroons and chocolates, all brightly coloured, many with a logo. Over the rainbow is – what? – nausea? I don’t want to shock the reader in these silent nights, but I have been in crack houses that felt more normal.
I don’t leave Disneyland with nothing. I have a Mickey Mouse breadboard – a silhouette of his face, I can cut him now – and a blurry photograph of a menopausal woman cuddling Donald Duck in a restaurant and weeping, because Walt was right, and now I have been to Disneyland I know he was right. Anything can happen. Merry Christmas, readers.
Disneyland Paris, Boulevard de Parc, 77700, Marne-la-Vallée, France.
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