A few years ago my wife and I went for Sunday brunch in a ‘family friendly’ south London restaurant. Footloose and child-free, we were ignorant of the implications of that innocent phrase.
Children ran around. Children screamed. Children ran around screaming. One child banged on the wooden floor with a plastic toy, over and over and over again.
It wasn’t a one-off experience. At a hotel in Worcestershire (family friendly, of course), we watched as a pair of whooping children did laps of the public rooms, at cocktail hour, dragging a wheeled horse behind them. A third little darling went around the elegant lounge blowing out every tea light.