James Proclaims!

As I write this it is the 3rd day of 2026, and a Saturday morning, but as I’m using my phone for the initial draft, I suspect it will not be Saturday when I get around to publishing this. I do tend to make quite a lot of typos on my phone and I’d like to eliminate at least some of those before letting the post ‘go live’.

I am sitting at a table in my local leisure centre, while my children run around in the massive soft play area therein. We have paid the appropriate fees for the privilege although there is absolutely no effort made by the staff at the centre to police this, so I’m often vaguely suspicious that not all of the other patrons have parted with any cash.

I imagine most people today have paid as there are no obvious children’s classes happening in the centre, what with it still being within the designated ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’. The freeloaders are usually the parents of kids who have had swimming lesson etc, and who are therefore already in the leisure centre. Whether they have made an honest mistake and assumed the soft-play to be a benevolent gesture on the part of the centre or whether they are knowingly taking advantage of the fact that there is no clear way of enforcing payment, I’m not sure. I’d like to think the former, but I’m quite sure it is more often the latter.

It’s less of an issue today as the world has not entirely returned to normality post Christmas. The bit between Christmas and New Year is generally a time of uncertainty, but there is a general acceptance that we are still very much within the Christmas period for the days that I like to refer to as Twixmas. Essentially all bets are off and we operate at a level both in terms of diet and activity that would result is some pretty serious health problems were we to sustain that for the entire year.

From the 2nd January onwards the uncertainty increases because the world does slowly return to normality but at different paces. This weekend is particularly confusing because it comes at the end of what most would consider the holiday but precedes the first working week proper of 2026.

Mini Proclaims starts her swimming lessons tomorrow morning. Mini Proclaims’ Sunday morning class is normally the sort of class to take the extra week and restart the lessons on the 11th January. But this year they’re starting back on the 4th. It is for this reason that I naturally assumed that Little Proclaims’ Saturday swimming lessons would start back today as they normally miss very few weekends. Generally the Saturdays that fall on or between Christmas Day are the only ones they cancel. And the weekend of the Reading Festival, because the leisure centre is essentially on the site of the festival and appropriated for corporate hospitality during that weekend. Quite possibly it is used by some of the actual acts . I certainly like to imagine Liam Gallagher enjoyed these facilities during his headline stint in 2024. Probably not the soft play though. I do like to believe that the band Soft Play, who are Reading Festival regulars, do use the soft play when they are in town.

Anyway I assumed that Little Proclaims would be swimming this morning and duly got my children out of bed at an hour they have become unused to over the last two weeks. I was able to placate them with the offer of post-swimming soft play, which Little Proclaims still finds appealing, even though she’s starting to age out of it a little. Although Mini Proclaims was not scheduled to swim this morning, she always comes along for the ride, as Mrs Proclaims has long held the view that if I’m taking one child out with me, I might as well take both. This is an arrangement I’m happy to go along with because it helps her to eke ever closer to the end of a PhD that has been her main occupation outside of childcare for the last 9 years (this unusual length of time can be explained partly by the part-time nature of her studies and partly by the fact that both of our children arrived into the world during this period and maternity leave was required from the studies in both cases). We believe 2026 will be the end of the protracted studies, but no-one is counting any chickens. Least of all Mrs Proclaims whose studies are related to French literature and not mathematics or agriculture.

Anyway, we were up and out at an unreasonable hour and arrived at the centre with more time to spare than is usually the case, although not early, because we’ve never achieved ‘early’. I was able to park in one of the parent-child parking spaces, which is one advantage of Mini Proclaims coming along, as Little Proclaims is now of an age that I would be in breach of the parent-child parking space rules were it just my eldest child in the car. Still, the availability of the space should have been the first alarm bell that not all was as it should be, as they are often all taken by the time we get there most weeks. And not all by parents with children under the age of five either. I imagine those rogue parents who park in the parent-child spaces with a six year old in tow are the same people who avail themselves of the soft play facility for free.

But this Saturday we got a space and rushed into the changing rooms, conscious that we only had a few minutes to get Little Proclaims into her swimming gear and into the class.

The changing rooms were not empty but there seemed to be a distinct absence of small children. Aware that something may be afoot, I told my daughters to wait in the cubicle while I went to see if I could spot any other young people and/or swimming teachers in the vicinity.

I could not.

I realised that I had made an error.

Little Proclaims’ swimming class does not start until next week.

I went back to the cubicle to tell Little Proclaims the news.

News she would describe as good news, because she doesn’t overly enjoy swimming lessons. I insist she continues with the lessons because she’s quite good at it and I’m quite sure she wouldn’t overly enjoy drowning in later life.

I was unable to access the cubicle because my children think it is hilarious to lock me out. They do this every week and every week find it to be the height of comedic brilliance. I am generally less amused.

I persuaded them to open the door with my usual cocktail of empty threats and lazy bribes and we exited the changing room.

This left me with a conundrum. I hadn’t actually paid for soft play yet and the soft play centre didn’t open for another 45 minutes, which would have coincided conveniently with when Little Proclaims finished her swimming lesson. So we could either forget the soft play and go home and interrupt Mrs Proclaims studies, or I could try and entertain them for a bit and then we could avail ourselves of the soft play later on.

As evidenced by the beginning of this post, I chose the latter option.

Entertaining my children largely entailed walking back to the car to drop off the swimming gear, and then taking them back into the leisure centre to sit in the, then-closed, café, where they could eat some snacks I’d brought from home.

Amazingly, we did manage to make the time pass, and, having paid for the soft play session and picked up the pink wristbands that my children refuse to wear (but which are nonetheless evidence that we have paid in the unlikely event that an employee of the centre ever deigns to check that all patrons are legitimate paying customers), we entered the soft play room.

Only for Little Proclaims to realise that she wasn’t wearing any socks. Because she doesn’t wear socks to swimming lessons. She wears Crocs over her bare feet for ease of changing and we put socks into the bag for after the lesson. The same bag I’d recently left in the car.

Socks are a must for soft play. It’s one of the rules they post on the door. And just because no-one ever enforces the rules any more than they check that anyone has actually paid, Little Proclaims is a stickler for the rules.

There was no way that child was going into the soft play with no socks on.

Fortunately the parent-child parking space is much closer to the centre than the normal parking spaces so the sprint back to the car did not delay the soft play fun for too long.

They are both in there now and the café is open, so I’m able to enjoy a slightly underwhelming coffee while I write this.

When soft play is over, we will be going to the supermarket to avail ourselves of groceries and to avail Mrs Proclaims of more uninterrupted study time.

There is parent-child parking at the supermarket too.

Socks are optional.