Welcome to Snibston Science Park, said the banner. This would be one of mine and my dad’s Bank Holiday Things. Tomorrow is pony-trekking. I will keep you posted, but can I just say that ponies and horses? They really freak me out. Their teeth; they smile as if they’ve all stolen human dentures. Ridiculous.
“Two for the science park?” said the man at the desk.
“Yep,” I said.
“One adult one child?”
My dad smirked.
“I’m an adult,” I said, gesturing. “Out of interest, what is the age for a child here?”
“Fifteen,” he said lightly, handing me a sticker.
Cheers.
“Would you like to go to the colliery?” he said, looking at me. I stare blankly at him.
“Depends what that is,” I said.
My Dad rolled his eyes. It turns out the colliery was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. But I’ll come to that.
We continued around the science park, where, after my Dad realised yesterday that I think Chile is near Japan and Mozambique is in South America, I filled in the gaps in my education.
After I learnt who invented the steam train, embarrassed myself in front of an 8 year-old by not being able to list the three ingredients to make fire (isn’t energy kind of a given when you have fuel and oxygen? No?), and compared my waist size to the average eighteenth-century corset, we assembled at 2:30 for the colliery tour.
We were halfway through the tour when I started to get edgy. We were standing outside on a strip of tarmac where they, for some reason, had laid out all the rusty machines and were GOING THROUGH HOW THEY WORKED.
After about half an hour of the revolutions per minute of the bunker, and where, exactly, the seam of the coal face relative to the shearer was and OH MY GOD SHUT UP ALREADY, I was starting to become confused. Wait, why are they pretending we’re in a mine? He was seriously demonstrating with the machines and gesturing to a pretend coal face.
I turned towards my Dad. “Coal mines are underground, right?” I said to him. He looked at me, aghast.
After Incredibly Boring Lady had asked eight questions about the history of the mine and the steam train, and where, exactly, the fire would have been lit (or something), MY FATHER ASKED A QUESTION. I disowned him at that moment.
Luckily for him, he was about to disown me.
“When are we going to go down this thing, anyway?” I said.
The tour guide stared at me. “What?” he said.
“When are we going into the mine.”
There was a pause. Yes, that kind of pause.
Then he smiled nervously, and Boring Woman started tittering.
“We’re not going down there,” she said, glancing at her husband.
My dad covered his mouth with his hand.
What? How was I to know? Why were we re-enacting the mine ABOVE THE GROUND? Where is the fun in that?
The tour guide decided to continue with his tour despite having a clearly remedial member of the public present.
“Now this part,” he said proudly, as I exhaled and become closer to throwing myself down the mine, “is the shaft itself.”
And then he said the word “behold.”
“The water down there is about seven feet deep. If we put a WHALE PIN [or something] in this, the water would spurt out, covering ALL OF LECIESTERSHIRE,” he said.
There was a gasp of awe.
And then there was silence. As I got completely and utterly the wrong end of the stick.
“What, there are whales down there?”
