The luxury of perspective

I have found hell. Surprisingly, it’s quite near our house.
It’s a children’s fun park. Amusements include bewildered animals, vertical slides that efficiently remove a child’s entire epidermis on contact and an enormous scaffolding climbing frame underpinned by a bracing approach to health and safety. There’s a laser tag course housed in a dank shed made atmospheric by the odd smear of luminous paint and a couple of fading purple lightbulbs. Adding to the drama are a few drapes which, if seen in daylight, would reveal fungi capable of giving death cap mushrooms the creeps. And merely to contemplate the soft play area is to know what a month-long eye infection treatable only by IV antibiotics feels like.
And then there are the other patrons: every top lip slippery with snot and a concerto of explosive burps and wind as though cholera was ripping merrily through the borough. Although the unceasing symphony of screaming is weirdly more tolerable than the noise of just one child whining.
Any visit to this nether world is punctuated by trips to a kind, compassionate first aider. He is a man wearied to the point of coma by the infinite stream of children who are strangers to self-preservation.
The refreshments continue the Hieronymus Bosch theme — burgers with the texture of a shire horse’s saddle and chips that suck the saliva from your mouth like a dentist’s cotton dam.
And yet my children find it entrancing and they are happy. So I, in turn, am in heaven.
Funny thing, perspective.