The soft play quote sat on the kitchen windowsill for three weeks, propped against the smart meter display like a bill I was daring myself to open. £15 a child, eighteen children, £270. Alfie's wishes for his sixth birthday were simpler: a slide, a dinosaur cake and "everyone in my class who's nice". The list on the back of an envelope came to eighteen names, and all eighteen said yes.
Why the church hall won
The hall was £45 for two hours on Saturday 22 November. It has a stage, a kitchen hatch, a tea urn that takes twenty minutes to boil, forty stacking chairs and a radiator that clanks as if someone is knocking from inside the wall. It was drizzling and 6 degrees outside, and a church hall at 1:45 on a November afternoon is not warm. Rob stood in front of the radiator until the first guests arrived, like a man guarding a fire.
The two hours had to cover blowing up balloons at the start and emptying the bins at the end, so the party itself ran from 2:30 to 3:45. Rob had swapped his Saturday round with a colleague to be there, and I gather there is now a debt. He ran the games like someone who sorts four hundred letters before breakfast: What's the Time, Mr Rex? (everybody creeps, somebody is always out first), musical statues, a hunt for eighteen plastic eggs with a dinosaur sticker inside each, and a pass the parcel with eighteen layers that Linda wrapped over two evenings. Steve carried the tables in and asked where the sweets were. He calls them spice.
The food was what I'd make for a normal Saturday tea if eighteen extra children turned up: cheese sandwiches cut into triangles, cocktail sausages, mini pizzas, crisps, halved grapes, cucumber sticks nobody touched, and squash in paper cups. Priya turned up at a quarter to two and spent the first half hour unwrapping sandwiches and laying out paper plates with me in the hall kitchen, which is the sort of friend she is.
What it came to
- Hall, two hours: £45
- Food and drink: £48
- Party bags (a sticker sheet, a bouncy ball, a small plastic dinosaur and a few sweets): £22
- Cake: £12
That's £127, or £7.06 a child, against £270 at the soft play. Their quote covered a party room and a set menu, so on food it was a fair comparison, if not on tidying up. The cake was meant to be a volcano. It came out as a green hill with a problem, according to Isla, with a herd of plastic dinosaurs standing round the problem. The £12 covered the sponge, the sprinkles and the dinosaurs. We sang, which is to say the grown-ups sang and eighteen six-year-olds shouted the numbers. Alfie blew out all six candles on the second go, said it was the best cake in the world and then asked if he could have the dinosaurs back.
Was it worth it?
Mostly, but it isn't a clean win. The soft play quote came with a room that wipes down, staff who tidy, and nobody asking me where the bin bags were. The hall came with forty chairs to stack, a kitchen floor I mopped at ten past four, and four parents who stayed and ended up holding tea towels. Against that, Alfie got a party at the right volume for him. In a ball pit he'd have vanished. Here he stood on the stage steps for the candles, then spent ten minutes under the trestle table with Zain when the singing got too loud.
One boy cried when he was out first at statues and cheered up at the eggs. I'd asked about allergies on the invitations, two parents replied and both were easy, and one mum stayed with her daughter anyway, which was fine by me. Isla, nine, filled the party bags at the kitchen table on Friday night and said she should be on "at least a pound an hour". I paid her in hot chocolate.
If we do it again at seven, I'd hire the hall for the whole afternoon so we aren't mopping against the clock, and I'd buy fewer grapes. Alfie's verdict on Sunday morning, in his dinosaur pyjamas, was "that was the best party and I want another one." Not for a year, I told him.
The sums: £127 for eighteen children, against £270 for the same eighteen at soft play. A difference of £143, and one Saturday I'd quite like back.
