Trampy Castle

When I was at university a friend of mine invited me to go to a Pantera gig at the Brixton Academy. Apparently his girlfriend had refused because he'd taken her to see Rage Against the Machine and someone had headbutted her in the mosh pit. "She's a bit sensitive about being headbutted" he rather gentlemanly stated. I fared about the same as his girlfriend, returning from the gig with a black eye and the imprint of a size nine Doc Marten on my face. Not to say I didn't enjoy myself. It was great. But it wasn't a shock to discover the guitarist later died of a lead overdose brought on by a gunfight at a gig. These days I'm less adventurous. The nearest I've come to this level of violence was being knocked out of my seat by a glitter pyrotechnic which hit me in the face at a Peter Kay gig. Embarrassing. The Wife found me lying stunned on the floor, glasses askew, looking like Liberace had upchucked on me.

However, both of these experiences pale in comparison to the wholesale slaughter involved in adding together; children, fizzy drinks and a bouncy castle. Take my word for it, at the merest sight of a bouncy castle your otherwise well behaved child will start frothing at the mouth, mount a brief and hilariously undignified attempt to get on it, and then lose all memory of the social skills you've been battering into them since the year dot. My two are still little enough to be at the mercy of the bigger kids, meaning whenever they get on a bouncy castle they spend the vast majority of the time being trampled on. This then means that the Wife and I end up in an endless dreary cycle of ;

1. Throw child into the melee
2. Watch as they pinball helplessly around
3. Retrieve crying child from bouncy castle
4. Calm them down
5. Have an argument because you don't think they should go back on
6. Lose the argument
7. Fling child back into the mayhem once again.

This is what happens when the bouncy castle is hired by responsible people. Alternatively you can be invited to the party of your kid's less charming classmate. You know the one. The one that when you're told -

"I've been invited to[anonymous] party."

- your initial thought is; "Oh... bollocks."

"I thought you didn't like him because he keeps hitting you?"
"Yeah. I hate him. But he's got a bouncy castle."

Admit it. You know the one I'm talking about. The one that lives in the council house with the rusting washing machine in the front garden. The one whose dad is a "Chewbacca" (hairy, refuses to wear trousers, shouts incoherently, cheats at boardgames...) and spends the party sitting in a corner, endlessly pouring Stella Artois down his neck, chain smoking and using the word "f**k" as verb, noun and punctuation. The one whose mum sets the bouncy castle up right next to a row of concrete fence posts, a pile of scrap metal and (in my imagination) used hypodermic needles. That one. Those are the sort of parties when you realise; a) why bouncy castles are wipe clean and b) the benefits of free health care.

And the public ones are even worse. When the Girl was only two I took her to a fete at the local park. Typically it was full of bouncy castles and inflatable obstacle courses of all shapes and sizes. Also typically, she chose to go on the one for the oldest children. The entrance to this was a narrow slot at one end, which she couldn't climb up to, leading me to post my daughter into what was essentially the seventh circle of hell. Or at least a machine for mincing children. Happy children went in one end, got mashed and stamped on and asphyxiated before being ejected, squalling and purple faced at the other end. And it was two quid a go. It was like having to pay to have hemorrhoids.

It's not easy seeing the Kids put through this. Whenever another kid treads on the apple of your eye the first reaction is to wade in and hand out a shoe-ing. Of course, you can't do that. Their dad might be bigger than you.

And you shouldn't attack other people's children. Obviously.

Sometimes however, you snap. At another party the Boy was being treated like a tennis ball by a slightly larger and vastly more obnoxious boy on a bouncy castle. I tried to let him fend for himself for a while, but bless him the Boy isn't a fighter. After a couple of minutes I intervened and asked him if he was all right. The boy pushing him snarled "I haven't done nothing" before preceding to shove someone else around. I ignored the urge to drop kick him over the fence and pulled my Boy aside.

"Dad, he keeps pushing me."
"Right, next time he does it, tell him to stop or you'll get angry. If he does it again, tell him again. If he does it a third time..."
 "Tell him again?"
"No, shoot him in the face with that Nerf gun."

Naturally shortly after this the Boy executed the aforementioned little turd with a single shot to the head. I know I shouldn't have been proud, but I was. There in a nutshell you have my parenting technique; morally dubious, but effective.