leaving the parc? I'm in the darc

A couple of unstructured thoughts after returning from a long weekend at Center Parcs with the family.

Firstly that "with the family" is how most people choose to go to Center Parcs; there are doubtless reasons why as a couple or small group of child-free adults you might choose to take a holiday at Center Parcs, but it's not completely clear to me what they are. That is in no way a criticism of either Center Parcs as a place or those people as people, it's just that a lot of the stuff is clearly targeted at people who have kids: the pool with its many exciting slides and rapids, the easy access to various kinds of food, the boating lake with various relatively sedate and low-speed child-friendly boat adventures. Yes, you'll be saying, but you can take the bikes and go and do lots of healthy bike stuff on your bikes. To which I would say, well, sort of. We'll come back to this.

Secondly, a word on spelling: "Center" in the American style with the "er" instead of the "re", and Parcs in the European style with the "c". These things reflect the organisation's Dutch origins, although following a split in 2001 the UK and Ireland operation is now a wholly separate organisation, though (presumably) retaining the spelling for continuity and brand recognition and stuff like that.

Center Parcs is not the only game in town when it comes to village-style experiences with centralised food and entertainment facilities, and we have previously gone (three or four times, I think) to Bluestone, which is over near Narberth in west Wales, and generally had a lovely time each time, If my records are correct the last time we were there was in December 2018, so the kids were a lot smaller then. One thing that affects is the kids' desire for more gnarly pool adventures now they're a bit older, and it must be said that the rapids at Center Parcs are a good deal more adrenaline-fuelled than anything Bluestone has to offer, as nice as the Blue Lagoon is. It should also be said that adults of adult height and weight being cajoled by their kids into traversing the rapids upwards of 30 times over the course of a long weekend will come home with a substantial collection of bruises to ankles, hips, etc. and in my case one ear filled with a lethal cocktail of earwax, pool water, cryptosporidium and child's piss which seems reluctant to unbung itself. I'm sure it'll be fine though. Anyway, more objective analyses of alternatives to Center Parcs, including Bluestone, can be found here. 

One thing I definitely can say about Bluestone is that, as lovely as cycling around the site is, it's also possible to seamlessly incorporate a trip off-site if you want to do a longer ride. I know this because we did it in 2014 as part of our first visit, when we hired a couple of bikes and one of those little trailers which we put Nia in (she'd have been two at the time).

The photo shows me and Nia heading around one of the paths at the northern edge of the resort which eventually leads up into the western end of Canaston Woods and joins the Knights Way. We did a fairly unambitious route up here, over to the bridge by Blackpool Mill and back again, with a few stops for exploring in between, all without at any point having to pass through a gate, an airlock or any other security barrier or being stopped by any sinister uniformed individuals slapping us across the face with a leather gauntlet and demanding to see our papers. The mill, by the way, was pretty much abandoned in 2014 but has since (under Bluestone's management, though it's outside the resort) been transformed into quite a ritzy-looking restaurant.

Anyway, when we planned our Center Parcs trip I noticed that the site (the first UK Center Parcs site, opened in 1987) was right next to the much larger Sherwood Pines Forest Park, a place with lots of cycle trails. Excellent, I thought, since now Nia has graduated from being a two-year-old in a trailer to a terrifyingly fit and active thirteen-year-old with her own bike, we could do with somewhere to go that offers longer rides than the Center Parcs site, which is fairly small. A quick look at an OS map shows that there is a big junction of paths right by the top left corner of the Center Parcs site; surely, you might think, an ingress/egress point for those wanting to do some longer cycling routes. Not so, as it happens, or not that we could find, anyway. Google Maps suggests that there is an egress point along the western boundary of the site but Nia and I cycled out there and had a look without finding it, and taking the route marked in red to the corner of the site doesn't yield an escape route either, there being a high fence on your left all the way round. 

The charitable view here is that this is more about keeping non-residents out than keeping residents in, especially important, one would imagine, at the Longleat site where non-residents who might want to get in include ACTUAL FREAKIN' LIONS, but there is a suspicion that it is a bit of the latter as well. Given that residents are issued with wristbands with some sort of RFID device which controls access to your lodge, swimming pool lockers etc., it's not impossible to imagine some sort of gate system controlled by the same device. Or they could just be less uptight and take the more easy-going approach that Bluestone take; don't signpost the route either internally or externally but make it available for those enterprising enough to want to take it. My personal inclination is to be irritated by cycling down a track that I expected to lead to freedom and adventure and personal autonomy and choice and be confronted with this:

In the end we found plenty to do without getting out into the wider forest area, and it is clearly physically possible to leave the site by the main entrance and loop round back into the Sherwood Pines site, albeit at the cost of 3-4 kilometres of extra distance. The whole thing is a little vexing, though, and does conjure up memories of the delightful public relations disaster that the Center Parcs organisation endured when trying to appear sufficiently reverent in the wake of the Queen's death in 2022. 

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO LEAVE YOUR LODGE https://t.co/FvuMjS2HRy pic.twitter.com/YVjRaC1fcP

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) September 14, 2022

A couple of footnotes: firstly anyone planning a visit to Bluestone and noticing its convenient next-door proximity to the Oakwood theme park should be aware that Oakwood has now, as of earlier this year, closed down permanently.

Secondly, this trip was actually my third visit to Center Parcs (all of them to the same Sherwood Forest site), this one and our previous family visit in 2023 but also a trip waaaaaay back in what would have probably been either 1992 or 1993 with my then-girlfriend Posy and her family during the course of which this absolutely splendid photo was taken of me. 

My principal recollection of that trip is of me and Posy's younger sister's boyfriend (who I suppose would have been about 18) spending most of the week leaving the girls to do their own thing and disappearing off to the sports hall for a ferociously-competitive series of bouts of various racket sports, bouts from which I have chosen to recall I emerged triumphant.

the last book I read

Kudos by Rachel Cusk.

We are back in the company of our nearly-anonymous narrator from Outline and Transit. I say "nearly" because her name is Faye (indeed the three-book sequence is informally known is some quarters as the "Faye trilogy"); we know this because it's (slightly archly) mentioned exactly once in each book (page 227 of 232 in my copy of this one).

Kudos opens pretty much exactly as Outline did; our narrator (a novelist) is on an aeroplane on her way to some literary event and strikes up a conversation with the man sitting next to her. Well, I say "conversation", but that implies some sort of reciprocal two-way thing, and in fact, in common with most of the conversations in all three books, this is largely one-way, the anonymous stranger telling a story after minimal prompting from our narrator, this story being a convoluted tale of woe involving his wife and daughter and a dead dog.

On arrival in Berlin for the literary event our narrator checks into her hotel and meets with her publisher, a couple of other authors, of varying ages and degrees of career development and success, and an interviewer. A similar process occurs with the ensuing conversations - with minimal encouragement people expound at some length on a variety of topics, usually centered around some event in their own lives but with plenty of more general philosophical musing on the side. Then there is an organised walking tour of Berlin, with the narrator and the guide, Hermann, striding purposefully off ahead of the group and finding that the subsequent waiting around for everyone to catch up offers further opportunities for conversation. Back at the hotel canteen the various authors struggle to negotiate the complex coupon system that enables them to get food, and we meet a couple of other authors, Gerta and Ryan. Ryan is the same guy as we met early in Outline, but now transformed from easy-going guy doing a casual teaching gig to terrifyingly driven, highly successful, gaunt, Fitbit-obsessed exercise fanatic.

We then move on to a barely-distinguishable literary event in a slightly warmer coastal location, probably Spain or Portugal, and more authors, in particular Sophia and her taciturn friend Luis, part of a group who go out to a restaurant, talk gloomily about their various divorces and push mysterious oily fish round their plates for a couple of hours. Then there are more interviews, and a meeting in a restaurant with the narrator's editor and translator wherein wine is drunk and further talk is talked. Going for a walk to clear her head, the narrator takes a phone call from her son, and, having talked him down from the grip of some minor crisis, wanders onto a nudist beach, strips off and takes a dip in the sea.

We can probably get the griping out of the way first: this is the third novel in this vein and so the novelty of Outline's structure and narrative voice has worn off a bit (not that it was as unprecedented as some seemed to think anyway), the business of most of the characters being either writers or critics or interviewers (i.e. people who either write, write about writers or talk to writers about writing) runs the risk of the whole thing disappearing up its own fundament, and the central character's own passivity and humourlessness grate a bit after a while. It's all very white and middle-class as well; I'm not well-versed enough in Marxist literary theory to feel emboldened enough to call a novel "bourgeois", but if I were this is the sort of novel I might do it for. The other obvious point to make is that in a novel supposedly populated by actual human beings who resemble in at least some respects the ones you and I know who populate planet Earth, nobody speaks in a way that at all resembles how actual people speak. This is just a structural problem with any novel that wants to articulate complex philosophical ideas and doesn't have an omniscient narrative voice that can just dump great big tracts onto the page: at least one of your characters has to articulate those ideas in a way that sounds like a series of things someone might plausibly actually say, which is inherently tricky. The gimmick of having the narrator's name be uttered only once, usually right at the end of the book, comes across as just that (i.e. a gimmick), particularly in Kudos where it's uttered by her son, slightly jarringly as he's just referred to his father as "Dad".

Tish and pish to all that, though, because this is still intensely readable (helped by being quite short), a brave and interesting formal and structural experiment, and there's nothing wrong with a book that makes some demands on the intelligence of its readers. It's easy, but dangerous, to make assumptions about how much events here are meant to mirror the author's own life: recently-divorced fortysomething novelist, mother of two teenage children, etc. etc., but what does seem pretty clear is that Cusk herself is fiercely intelligent, slightly intense and a bit humourless, rather like her narrator here. 

Previous series of at least three books where all of them feature on this blog are Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy and William Gibson's Bridge trilogy. Only one book to go for Patricia Highsmith's Ripley series to join that list: watch this space.