![]() Over 10 laps I suffer the humiliation of being repeatedly overtaken on the figure-eight course, although there is one little kid in a half-size car who I lapped on at least five occasions, comprehensively ruining his afternoon. Out on the track, I wedge my frame into a tiny car and sit through a stern lecture about some of my fellow racing drivers being small children. View image in fullscreen Easy rider … Dowling in his go-kart. “Name, date of birth, sign in the box,” she says, pushing the paper my way. When I inquire about hiring a car she stands on her chair to reach the waiver forms above her head. Satisfied, I head next door to the go-karts.Īny awkwardness I might have felt about being a 60-year-old man approaching the ticket window of a seafront go-kart track is multiplied when I notice that the cashier behind the glass seems to be about nine years old. ![]() After only an hour I have converted £10 into 500 2p coins, 500 coins into 350 tickets and 350 tickets into a £1 bag of sour gummy worms. All the while I am being rewarded with tickets, until I end up garlanded with them. I compete in a game of Connect 4 using small basketballs. I kill some dinosaurs with a machine gun that squirts water. I try my hand at a different machine, loosely based on the board game Monopoly. I have a small advantage – some of the monsters that are meant to block the path of my coins have fallen off through wear and tear – but the machine still has a bigger one. Points mean tickets, and tickets mean prizes. You just roll coins across a moving field hoping they will end up in slots offering different points. It takes me a moment to understand the strategy, which is: there is no strategy. Armed with a bucket of 2p coins, I sit down at a machine called the Tower of Terror. If I wanted, I could spend the whole weekend in the arcade. This life plan didn’t work out for me, but no matter, I’m here now and I have one thing my 11-year-old self could only dream of: plenty of money. When you grow up you can marry someone who lives next to the arcade.” She always gave the same answer: “My mother would never take me to the beach, so when I grew up I married someone who lived near the beach. ![]() When I was young, I loved an amusement arcade, but my mother hated them and refused to take me, even for my birthday. But the arcade is in full swing on a Saturday, and that’s where I’m headed first. The seafront at Hastings, East Sussex, is not at its best at this time of year – lots of the rides aren’t open, and dark clouds are moving in from offshore. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian The seafront View image in fullscreen Come fly with me … Ozzie the owl at Hounslow Urban Farm. ![]() On the way home I thought only of gambolling sheep, hungry pigs and a cockroach living nine days without a head. On the walk to the farm all I could think was: this would be a very good place to leave a body in a rolled-up rug. Overall, it’s a truly uplifting way to spend a morning. Luckily, Ozzie is amazingly good at this – my flinching doesn’t put him off. I end my visit inside one of the farm buildings, with Ozzie the owl flying across the room to my gloved hand, which clutches a tempting glob of eviscerated chick. I’m being gently mobbed, and it’s very pleasing. Tomkins knows the name of every animal on the farm – they run to greet her wherever she goes – but I can’t tell Timmy the sheep from his friend Barnaby, possibly because I’m surrounded by a whole flock, all sticking their heads in my feed bucket before I am halfway to the trough. On my way to feed the sheep I stop to stroke a curious alpaca leaning over his fence. The farm fields are thick with mud from all the recent rain, but the sun is just breaking through as I squelch my way past lines of tiny schoolchildren. When I run out of apples, Alfie appears to have some thoughts about trampling me, before changing his mind and wandering off. You don’t want your fingers anywhere near his mouth. With Alfie, it’s more like dropping them into a wood chipper. Alfie’s partner, Emma (only 300kg), accepts the apples with a certain polite delicacy. If I were truly looking at the world through the eyes of a child, I might well start crying at this point. He also really likes apples, and has me backed up against the stall pretty quickly. Alfie the pig weighs 500kg, so if he steps on your shoe, you’ll know it. Then it’s time to move outside to feed apples to pigs. I am draped in snakes, stick insects and a bearded dragon called Flo. View image in fullscreen What a charmer … Dowling and Fred the python at Hounslow Urban Farm.
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