Joy at Joyland!

During our Easter holiday to Lowestoft we took the girls for a trip to Great Yarmouth to sample the unequivocal JOY that is JOYLAND! This is a holy ground of mythology and folklore in my family and was a hotly anticipated annual outing for myself, brother and cousin, all of whom could not WAIT to sample the many excitements on offer; namely some kind of small roller coaster in the centre (now the Spook Express, was Noahs Ark) Neptunes Kingdom (still there) and the Tubs (way more thrilling and neck breaking than the name suggests…)

It is however ‘The Snails’ that hold the most resonance amongst all the joyous delights. This legendary fairground ride remains one of the original rides from when Joyland first opened in 1949 and has featured in generations of my family history on both my Mum and Dads side. I recall my now deceased Grandparents talking about the Snails, as have Aunties, Uncles and cousins since. All members have at one time adhered to tradition and taken a ride on these colourful, cheeky faced molluscs both as children and then as parents of children enjoying the ride for the first time.

So it was with huge pleasure and a sense of inevitability that I watched Eve and Anabel screaming in delight as they clanked around the small ‘Snail Trail’, both breathless with excitement as their snail slowed and then lurched with a creak and a whirr of an ancient outmoded mechanism painfully hauling you up a small incline only to hurl you down a smaller decline, then slow again, allowing time to wipe your streaming tears and gather your senses before the next hedonistic trip. It certainly brought back memories of my own childhood and how I insisted on going on the Snails time and again, never tiring of the magic.

However, in the same vein as the lore that decrees that as children get older and become adults they lose their power to believe in magical things like The Tooth Fairy or Santa, the magic of Joyland is now truly lost on me. I am shocked at how small it is and how grimey it appears. The generations of families that have been frequenting Joyland since 1949 is almost tangible in all you see, feel, touch and smell. It appears that amidst all the joy, someone forgot to clean or repaint Joyland since it opened many mythical moons ago. The rides (that I had to join the children on) were so ridiculously short (FOR A POUND EACH) that I probably garner more of a thrill alighting a bus of a working morning and paying the driver. Joyland is to all intents and purposes quite joyless , a rip off and generally pretty grim.

BUT the magic still does live on of course, through the children that go. Eve and Anabel thought that it was the best place EVER and were utterly enraptured and delighted the entire afternoon. It was well worth the 30 quid it cost for them to go on rusting, rotten, dirty, miniscule rides because in their eyes, it was truly enchanting and other worldly. So the tradition now continues and we will be back each year until they progress onto bigger things and I will enjoy it, despite my qualms because ultimately, giving them joy is my greatest happiness.