"May I recommend my radical new weight-loss programme? It?s unconventional and a mite pricey, but, as sure as I can eat three packets of Monster Munch in one sitting, it?ll work.
All you have to do is stay at Disneyland Paris for a week. Then, as if by magic, you?ll find that not only is your belly flatter (since you?ll no longer be able to afford food), your facial muscles will have toned up beautifully. This is because you?ll spend much of the time mouthing the words: ?How much? F* a duck?, while stretching your features into the shape of The Scream.
Oh, I?m joking. Sort of. I don?t at all resent that within four days we?d spent £1,200, not including the hotel or passes, mainly on feeding ourselves and two children (and alcohol, obviously, for the nerves). Disney is about sprinkling a little fairy dust on the kiddies, so what Grinch would begrudge restaurants charging £6 for a pint of Fosters, plus £17 for a chuffing burger?
Sincerely, I doff my hat to Disney?s genius. I?ve seen Bambi, I know how they play us like violins, but never have I seen a machine so brilliantly conceived to suck up money. It?s so slick you barely notice. From the hotel pool being just a tad too cold for the kids to stay in long (thus ensuring you?re back out buying pointless figurines and Minnie Mouse ears), to the signs above the shop doors reading: ?Nothing makes a child smile like a new toy? ? all is calculated to bleed you, ever so sweetly, dry. Remember that squid creature with the grasping tentacles in Pirates of the Caribbean? It?s a not dissimilar feeling: like being French-kissed by a giant succubus until you?re a spent husk.
This was my first Disney foray and I?ve realised that it?s a bit like childbirth. No one admits how painful it is until you?re in it. Other parents tell you only the good bits: not that a very basic lunch for four in the nearby ?Disney Village? will set you back £80; that it?s nigh impossible, outside your hotel, to get nice food (I ended up not eating ? another triumph for The Programme); that you?ll stand for 90 minutes in a queue for your child to meet Cinderella, then pay £12 for the official photo; that you?re fish in a barrel handing over euros like hypnotised monkeys.
Oh, and it was hugely enjoyable. Not the queues or the freeze-your-knackers-off weather, nor the pushy, Eurotrash parents who monopolise Mickey Mouse by photographing each of their children with him indi-bloody-vidually and buy a different Princess dress for their daughters each day, but the permanent fantasy element. It?s like a continuing LSD trip with 6ft mice in coat tails.
In fact it?s worth going just for the Tower of Terror (fastpasses ? it?s the only way). Like the Disney experience generally, it?s all an exquisite form of masochism.
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