Disneyland
I HAVE just come back from taking the children to Disney in Paris for a couple of days.
Disney is one of the few holidays which suit teenage girls and a six-year-old boy.
I had been to Disney in Florida for a day, but that was over 25 years ago, on my 21st birthday.
And the spooky thing was that despite the quarter century time gap, and the fact we were on a different continent, the only obvious difference appeared to be the weather.
But there were subtler differences which gradually peeped out behind the Disney façade now and again.
Let’s take the slapping incident, for example.
When we got off the Eurostar we were driving home and heard a news report about a Disney cast member who had been suspended for allegedly slapping a teenage boy.
A father claimed a Disney Tigger character slapped his son around the ears and the bouncy old Tigger might be bounced right out of his job.
I don’t know which Disney theme parks this happened at, but the children and I instantly decided it must have been Paris.
This was, firstly, because we had just seen an excessively-bouncy Tigger, in a lurid acid-orange coloured tiger suit, with far too much energy that very weekend. He got into character up to the point where he was bouncing madly on and off fences and on to off-limits grass. The children around him looked slightly worried.
The girls and I decided that either he’d taken something hallucinogenic, been affected by the toxic colour of his costume or he’d been Tangoed.
The second reason we suspected the slapping might have happened in France was because of the very different style of parenting we witnessed.
We were in the queue for Space Mountain 2 when there was a slight altercation behind us and a teenage French girl attempted to push by us.
I shuffled slightly to one side, blocking her path. Childish, I know, but like all well brought-up Brits, I see queue jumping as the ultimate in bad manners.
I was then aware of some quiet French conversation behind me. I turned around just in time to see an extremely chic and smartly-dressed woman of about my age violently slapping a stocky 13 or 14-year-old boy across the face. Hard.
The boy did not make a sound. He just stared at the floor ahead and carried on shuffling forward in line.
I was shocked. What a culture difference?
I realised that in England, parents now know it is not acceptable to use physical violence in public.
The boy’s wordless acceptance was another surprise. Can you imagine how a teenage boy in the UK would react? At the very least you might expect a ‘What was that for?’ followed by a loud war of words and threats to ring Childline.
It was not the only time we witnessed parents being far more strict than we ever see in this country. Even in the fun atmosphere of Disney, children who were with their parents didn’t step out of line (but there were gangs of older children rudely pushing and shoving in every queue).
While it’s lovely to see well-behaved children, it made me wonder how often violence and public humiliation were the reason.
I disagree totally with smacking children, but neither I nor anybody else in the queue intervened on the boy’s behalf.
I asked myself if this was because of personal cowardice, the language barrier or a feeling that, in France, this was perfectly acceptable parenting.
Everything at Disney may look the same on either side of the Atlantic. But scratch the surface and you wonder if it is such a small world after all?