What is a holiday? A break from the remorseless routine? Relaxation and pampering? Returning feeling renewed and refreshed?

If you have small children, none of those things are true.

Forest Lodge Land is like an ideal futuristic society, that turns out to be a scary futuristic prison, surrounded by beautiful trees, surrounded by beautiful razor wire. I’m fine with razor wire, if it keeps my children out. A nice relaxing spell in a futuristic prison sounds like exactly what I need.

What thought crime do I have to commit? Just as long as when I arrive in future prison I don’t find my children already there.

Turns out that when you take a two-year-old away from his place of bedtime routine, a routine that barely holds together the illusion of control you have carefully constructed around him, he literally goes mental. He spends most of the night charging around the forest lodge cackling like a shrunken Joker. When they slide the slider in the control room that makes the sun come up and releases the robot squirrels outside your window, you’ve had just enough sleep to remind yourself how lovely sleep would be if you had enough of it.

Then you have to leave your lodge and go and have fun.

Yes, there is fun. And joyful moments. But the future that inevitably awaits you is a family of five wet, tired, grumpy, shivering people in a tiny, cold, smelly changing cubicle. That’s about as dystopian as the future gets. Then you will realise that one of you has filled his entire swim suit with faeces.

Finally you arrive home, late in the evening, too tired to cry. Tomorrow is the school run. The prospect of the remorseless routine of life seems like a blessed relief.

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