Soft play is a nightmare – so why are adults leaping into the ball pit? | Zoe Williams

There is a generational sweet spot – I’m guessing anyone between 65 and 80? – who won’t know what soft play is. You take the principle of a playground, then move it indoors, often to a windowless space in which redeeming features such as fresh air have been removed. Then you add a load of padding and hollow plastic balls in primary colours and reduce the mean age of the children to three or under – when they are mainly screaming or making bad choices. Mess with the acoustics – it’s either the lack of windows or the aggressively cheap corrugated wall material – so that the cacophony is warped and comes from every direction, then submerge all the children beneath the balls, which mysteriously makes them louder, but now invisible.

Now, every adult is in a chamber of hypervigilant solitude – you can’t see your kid and you can’t figure out whether that noise is coming from him or her, or a pack of wolves – and disoriented by the visual overload.

I thought it was the great mystery of the leisure circuit – why we put ourselves through it – then an adult-only soft play opened in north London. It’s the same, except there is a bar; presumably, there is less screaming and greater continence, but in every other respect it can only be exactly as bad. It can’t be for new parents – that would be like escaping your children just to look after someone else’s – but it can’t be for old parents, as it would waken memories so bad as to eclipse any good ones. It must be for people remembering their own soft-play years, an act of regression that, if it had a trace more enjoyment in it, would count as a fetish.

Elsewhere in galloping infantilism, a fight broke out on a Ryanair flight last week when, it has been claimed, one bloke wouldn’t let the other pass by him to get to his window seat. But at least that is a dispute that two six-year-olds might have and isn’t a full reversion to toddlerhood. Just how bad has adult life got, anyway?