47. Grumble tots [Chorlton Leisure Centre]

It is Friday morning, 8.15am. Milo is tugging my leg.

‘Bun! Mummy, BUN!’

Milo has already eaten a man-sized bowl of porridge, a whole banana and several fistfuls of raisins. He’s also downed a bottle of milk. But it’s not enough.

‘Mummy, bun!’

I explain that, having just got out of the shower, I’m in no position to run to the bakery and purchase bread products of any kind, let alone a teacake.

Milo shoots me a look, one that says, hmmm, other mothers always have some sort of edible fallback. I give him a look that says sorry, I did stock up at the start of the swine flu crisis but then your Dad and I ate our way through our emergency energy bars, frozen bread and dried fruit and now the cupboard is bare.

It’s the wrong answer. He begins to howl.

Ten minutes later, still sobbing, Milo is wheeled into the Barbakan. Two minutes after that, I offer him a teacake the size of his head, which he grabs with both hands. His face disappears; replaced instead by a bun that appears to have a halo of blonde hair. For a moment I wonder if my son is half baby, half teacake.

This is our Friday morning ritual: a race against time to get out of the house and into the bakery, where we eat buns and absentmindedly watch the comings and goings of people and traffic on Manchester Road. And then we head to Chorlton Leisure Centre for their tumble tots session and burn off our breakfast on the bouncy castle.

You can tell the staff at the Leisure Centre love us mouthy mums. Whoever draws the short straw and has to sit in to ‘supervise’ the session does so with a newspaper in hand. Presumably, the paper is there to relieve the boredom, though sometimes the din of several dozen screaming toddlers reaches such epic proportions it’s all I can do not to nick it off them and shove it in my ears.

Sometimes the supervisor has no paper, and I swear he (it’s almost always a he) sits there, arms crossed, thinking up ways to get his own back. Like the time the Centre suddenly announced the withdrawal of footballs, ‘because they’re too hard and the children might hurt themselves’ (cue Milo spending the best part of an hour roaming the sports hall mournfully calling out for a ball).

Or the time it was decided that, despite the provision of toddler-sized picnic tables, food and drink were now banned.

The absence of balls went the same way as the lack of food and drink: the footballs mysteriously reappeared a week later, as did the clusters of little ones chucking raisins about and stuffing bits of banana into odd places. When I spotted the footballs, I smiled at the man on the chair. He didn’t smile back.

And when the fire alarm went off and us mums and grans faffed about with shoes and coats and general child-herding, and took our time getting outside, figuring that if it was the real thing they’d have opened the fire escape and unleashed a wave of under 3s direct onto the street, and, OK, maybe, just maybe, we had a bit of a chat amongst ourselves about how unreasonable it all was instead of marching efficiently outside, well, when that happened the man on the chair shouted at us to GET A MOVE ON, IT’S A FIRE ALARM.

And I swear he had a glint in his eye as he said it. You know, I think it made his week. Or at least made up for all the screaming, crying, squealing, gossiping, kicking, laughing and downright badly behaved parents he has to put up with week in, week out.

Chorlton Leisure Centre: we salute you.

Ratings. Babychanging facilities: Yes. Cafe: No. Buggy-friendly? Yes. Cost: £2.30 per child (sessions held Mon, Wed and Fri, 9.30-11.30am). Worth it? Yes, despite my moaning, there’s a good variety of toys and activities and it’s perfect for a rainy day.