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We hadn't slept well in the hell hole of a hotel we'd booked into, and decided to go elsewhere for breakfast, so walked off into the medieval city of Salisbury. Like any tourist ot incompetent assassin we were keen to see the spire of the Cathedral before we got on our way. Worth a trip from Russia.
But the next few days are all about Center Parcs so we headed off there and were checking in by 10.30am. You can't get into your accommodation until 4pm (and they're strict about that - we tried to get in at 3.30pm but our keys didn't work) but we'd packed light and just headed to the pool.
The good news was that my groin had repaired itself in the heat of the night, so I could participate in all the fun. Ernie had happily gone on pretty scary water slides when he was last at this particular CP three years ago, but now he's inherited his dad's innate feats and had to come off the Rapid River flume because he was too freaked out.
As usual a trip to the CP swimming centre is a reminder of how badly out of shape becoming a parent makes you. I have really let things slip on tour and just added to the cavalcade of out of shape adults. There was one really muscly guy who had looked after himself in spite of having managed to breed. I really wanted to go up to him and say, "Honestly I think we're the only two people here who are even bothering any more."
But it makes you feel a lot less self-conscious to be walking around with a belly and your arse-crack hanging out the back of your trunks when you're surrounded by men just like you.
The kids love Center Parcs and it is a good, if ludicrously expensive holiday and we're only doing 3 nights this time, which is plenty. Every time I come I am surprised by the rubbish restaurants though. All the same kind of boil in the bag family friendly stuff where it's very hard to eat healthily. We went to Bella Italia tonight and no offence to Bella or her staff, but it's very basic. I am only hoping for something like Pizza Express or Pret a Manger, but surely they'd do amazing business amongst this aspirational clientele (me included).
I tried to get sea bass to be healthy, but they'd run out and I had a claggy bowl of seafood pasta instead.
There was a man sitting on the next table who looked a bit like Rupert Murdoch, but I don't think it was him. I wondered where Rupert Murdoch got to take his family for holidays - but they probably had some island with it's own amazing water slides and where you could also hunt humans. I felt sad for Rupert Murdoch that he was missing out on the joys of Bella Italia at Center Parcs though. They've got a cat robot waiter that delivers your horrible food.
But any kind of proper celebrity could not do a holiday like this. It's certainly manageable for me. A few dads stare at me a bit too long in the pool (though they might be jealous of my beach(-ed whale) bod) and occasionally a member of staff asks me where they know me from - House of Games tonight and another waiter asked me if I'd been on Mastermind as some of the other waiters thought I had. I suspect he meant Taskmaster, but it'd be great if people knew me from a decades old edition of the egg head quiz (proper egg head, unlike Eggheads). But it's not been enough to distract me from my holiday or inconvenience me.
I guess a real celeb could come here, because you'd assume it couldn't actually be them and leave them alone. So maybe it was Rupert Murdoch. Though Center Parcs might be a bit too expensive even for him.
