We went for a lovely walk today – the weather was great, the kids didn’t moan a bit and we came home refreshed and happy. ONLY JOKING!!! This is what really happened:

We arrived at the country park. I’d told Rich I believe you have to pay for parking. He said that wasn’t the case – he came here all the time as a kid and there was no charge.

I said that was in the 80s and they had since introduced a fee to help with the upkeep costs (or what is more likely, so that a private company can make excessive profits from doing precisely zero to maintain an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty).

The machine was broken. Luckily we had the app – that charges you 20p extra. So £2.70 for 2 hours, bargain.

We got out. Herbie dicked around in the car park until he nearly got run over.

We traipsed back up the road we’d just driven down on the insistence that Rich remembered a path we could use. He led us to a beautiful clearing that turned out to be a cul-de-sac. Gus picked up a stone and Herbie took it off him and wouldn’t give it back so Rich pushed Herbie over in the mud in frustration.

Herbie then spent the next 15 minutes complaining he had mud on his trousers that was making his leg ‘itch’. The mud then managed to miraculously make its way into his left wellie, which Herbie then refused to wear because the mud was ‘digging’ in.

Gus then fell over in dog shit and refused to walk any further. Rich couldn’t carry him because he was covered in dog shit. So we flapped around with wipes and a nappy bag as a howling wind caught the bag, making it impossible to do anything with.

Herbie and Gus were now both wailing that they wanted to go home. I was striding towards the cliffs with the intention of not stopping.

We decided to go home – 25 minutes after we had arrived, having walked roughly in a circle around the car park and approximately 10 metres across a field whilst reminiscing why we can’t go for a walk in the wet British winter with small children in a gale-force wind through a mud-churned bog in a place where dog walkers let their pets crap all over the place.