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Five disappointing trips and activities to book with the kids this Easter

WANT to spend your Easter weekend dragging the kids round underwhelming activities while getting ripped off? Go to these places.

City farm

At first the whole family will be on a high as you gaze at the animals. But you’ll soon realise there are only six of them and all they do is stand around looking depressed and emitting the odd bleat of despair. The real highlight will be a stale slice of cake in an overpriced cafe that stinks of shit. 

Museum

You’ll spend your time exhausting yourself as you try to convince your bored children that visiting a museum about lawnmowers or pencils was a good idea. You won’t have a single second to take in any of the punishingly dull information yourself, and the whole day will be a grim death march towards the inevitable tantrum in the gift shop.

Swimming pool

If your idea of fun is standing shoulder-to-shoulder with other largely naked parents in piss-filled waters, this is the day out for you. Other high points include wrestling your kids in and out of their swimming gear, being permanently on edge that there might be an accident, and feeling a verruca starting to form on your foot. All for the best part of 20 quid.

National Trust property

The weather will screw over your plans to stroll around a Tudor garden, so you’ll eat your picnic in the car instead. Eventually you’ll be forced to explore the stately home which is too boring for anyone to appreciate, and if things brighten up you’ll spend the afternoon in a playground telling your kids ‘We really have to leave now’ 300 times.

Theme park 

A trip to the theme park combines the thrill of taking your bickering family on a 100-mile drive with the joy of repeatedly standing in a queue for 90 minutes. And just when you get round to the one ride you’ve been looking forward to, your kid will chicken out and you’ll be forced to bow out yourself.

Six things never to mention at a middle class dinner party

SOME middle class friends have invited you round for dinner and naturally you want to make a good impression. Try not to f**k it up with the following conversations.

How your underachieving kids are doing

Don’t mention Carl has landed an apprenticeship to be a mechanic when Francesca is reading English at Balliol. They may not be massive snobs about it, but they’d rather not be reminded your spawn will be earning soon, whereas they face years of subsidising their child to do unpaid internships in the media or, worse, put on terrible one-woman plays. 

‘I’ve never had grouse before’

Very few people live on a diet of game, because they’re not a poacher or Robin Hood. However the other guests will like to pretend they’ve sampled every type of food, even if they haven’t. Play the game, and for f**k’s sake don’t say it tastes like chicken. 

How much you spent on wine

Not because it’s crass to talk about money – middle class dinner parties frequently involve hours of dreary conversational brain rot about other people’s house prices and investments. It’s just that if you chirpily say £5 on the grounds it all ‘tastes the same’, it reminds them they know f**k all about wine and aren’t actually enjoying this obscure £25 shiraz, which may well be corked. Keep schtum and just enjoy having a bottle of wine to yourself.

Sport

Football is really the only sport you know much about, and blathering on about how United looked solid defensively on Saturday means you may as well have come dressed as Andy Capp. Your hosts won’t be sufficiently posh to be into lacrosse or polo, but there’s a far worse conversational risk: f**king golf. Take some discreet wireless headphones just in case.

Your health issues

That painful bunion or the ongoing saga of your haemorrhoids may be important to you, but now is not the time to bring them up. That’s not really a class thing, it’s just horrible. However there is a distinct possibility they’ll have a more aspirational ailment to trump you with, eg. being allergic to camembert.

Brexit

This could go one of two ways. You may be subjected to a superior rant about how thick/racist the working classes are. That’s your dear old mum they’re talking about, although to be fair she is pretty racist. Alternatively you may find yourself listening to a Telegraph-reading Tory imbecile who thinks Brexit is going swimmingly. Probably best avoided as a topic, as angrily asking someone ‘Have you had your f**king brain removed?’ does lower the tone somewhat.

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