From my observations, it takes women two years to forget the pains of childbirth and say, "Oh! Why not do it again?" The same, I feel, is true of the Disneyland experience.
Though some women are wiser than others; two years ago, I went to Disneyland Paris with Suzanne Moore and our children, and when I asked her at the start of the summer if she fancied going again, she shrieked: "You're joking! It took me three weeks to get back on my feet again last time! Why don't we go to Bosnia instead? It's really hot, and dead cheap." (She wasn't joking.) It wasn't long before I started thinking that Bosnia would have been quite nice, really.
In the Eurostar lobby at Waterloo you are already entering the tragic kingdom of Framerica, where people stuff croissants to the sound of a live Dixieland band. You don't need that sort of force-fed "joy" at 9 a.m., if ever, I thought as we were piped aboard to the strains of You're The Cream In My Coffee and I started to have bitter and obdurate thoughts about the whole concept of Disneyland Paris.
This is France, guardian of European culture, scourge of Hollywood - yet the minute there's a chance for them to make a million out of Mickey Mouse, they roll over and open wide for Uncle Sam's proffered wad. You can't help thinking that despite their stage-managed spats, France and the US are real kissing cousins; France gives the US the Statue of Liberty, the US gives France M Mouse - two nasty, boring, blank-eyed icons who have somehow mistaken themselves for kings of the world.
Enforced jollity, that sad American tic, starts very early into the Disneyland experience. Defeated actors, who've probably spent three years studying Ibsen, caper through the carriages of the Eurostar dressed as jugglers, clowns and something I couldn't quite make out, but the poor man was strait-jacketed in a sort of polka-dotted, spiralling tube.
The food was alarmingly bad, like aeroplane grub with a grudge against mankind. The toilets were swimming with urine an hour before we arrived; back in my seat, I had to change my outer garments. When we pulled into Disneyland, I was already in tears. Tragic Kingdom, indeed.
The first thing you have to grasp about Disneyland Paris is that it's bloody expensive. In a flagrantly cynical rebuttal of the Disney idea that childhood is a long and precious reverie, children count as adults from the age of 12.
For three adults, travel and accommodation at one of the on-site hotels for two nights will see you with no change whatsoever from £1,000. That's not counting meals, and extras certainly cost extra here - £10 for a couple of cocktails.
On August 20th, gendarmes had to escort Mickey and Minnie Mouse to safety after they were pinched and punched by a posse of children. According to the Guardian report: "Tigger, too, left the park of his own accord after being hit several times"; Stromboli, Baloo and King Louie suffered similar fates. The children were presumed to be rogue tots, acting off their own bats. I suspect that their parents, incandescent with rage at having to shell out Fr17 for a mini-bar Fanta, put them up to it.
The Hotel New York, with its half-indoor, half-outdoor pool and its Rockefeller Centerstyle skating rink surrounded by fountains, is beautiful. I am an ersatz girl, and have no desire to ooh and ahh at the real Now York, complete with rancid Yanks, so this suited me fine.
Apparently - and understandably, considering the cost of a jaunt here - Disneyland is becoming very popular with corporate conventions. It is certainly very conventional, with very little leeway for individual or spontaneous behaviour.
Creepiest of all, I thought, were the Kodak Photo Spots ("hosted" by Kodak) - particularly picturesque spots for your shuttersnapping pleasure. As though people couldn't work out for themselves what would make a good picture!
I've always thought that extreme conformism held a beat too long becomes weirdness, and the Disneylands are a splendidly surreal illustration of this, particularly the "It's A Small World" ride - boats float slowly through a huge grotto populated by hundreds of singing and dancing dolls representing every race, colour and creed, insisting that, yes, "It's a small world after all".
My 12-year-old said it was racist and sizeist, "showing midgets as figures of fun". I told him the dolls were meant to be the world's children, like in a Benetton ad, but he wasn't having any. It was truly one of the oddest things I have ever seen - I wouldn't like to have to look at those dolls on drugs, for sure.
The Phantom Manor is to other ghost trains what the Concorde is to Monarch Airlines. In The Stepford Wives, the ringleader of the men who swap their feisty spouses for robot slaves has the nickname "Diz", because he used to work on the figures at Disneyland, and the real mind-boggling skill of the brains behind Disney can be seen in the breathtaking animatronics.
I don't believe that Disneyland boffins go around trading in their ageing wives for younger robots, but the models are scary nevertheless because so much effort has gone into them. When you consider what that effort and skill might have otherwise been put towards, that's the chilling bit; the millions of pounds spent creating leisure instead of decent lives.
In the breathtaking "Pirates Of The Caribbean" ride (hit it around 5 p.m. and go on it five times in a row without queueing: it's a transcendental experience), I saw the flames of the ever-burning galleons and I thought of the French National Front and the brooding Arab suburbs; is Paris burning?
We floated in the motorised boats through the shallow water in the dark, and I tried to spot the changes that have reputedly been made in an effort to make the tableaux less sexist. I'd read that instead of chasing women with evil intent, pirates would now be chasing them with offerings of food, but there was still the line of bound women, weeping, and the foxy captives being duelled over by pirates.
The one concession to feminism was an older woman chasing a pirate with a rolling pin; but remember, this is France. Real women didn't get the vote until 1945, so why should we believe that unreal women would get their feelings catered to? Mind you, the idea of PC pirates is a silly one; it would be far worse, morally, if we actually came away from the ride admiring them.
There was a silence, and then out of the darkness came the voices of my son and my boyfriend as one: "Shut up!" I lay there and thought how strange and sad it was that affluent Euros were coming from all across the Continent to marvel at these wonders, that puppets lived in splendour while a few miles away thousands of people lived in cardboard boxes.
I know that you can make this point about any western European theme park, but Disneyland with its resonance of the American Dream and the capitalist nightmare seemed particularly to beg the comparison. Staring into the dark, I imagined Disneyland itself in flames, faux or otherwise. What would that look like? Would it be The Greatest Show On Earth?
I really believe that half the appeal of theme parks is the way they cater to the desire of modern affluent parents to prove to their children how much they love them. We can't hunt small tasty dinosaurs or protect them from snaggle-toothed tigers anymore, so we must do something else unpleasant instead. At the most basic level, you can see little Brittany getting her legs slapped at Butlin's when it all goes horribly wrong; at Disneyland, the women are Eurochic, but the mute misery on their faces at the end of a long, hot day speaks an international language. I myself burst into tears at the end of the second day when FantasyLand station was unexpectedly closed and we had to walk back to the hotel.
Another reason for their success is the desire of western Europe to suffer as a penance for destroying (albeit temporarily) communism in the east. At Disneyland, we can experience some of the deprivations of modern Russia: queue for hours and pay a fortune for the privilege of having America shove its trash in our faces. The only way to deal with it after three hours on your feet is to adopt a Zen attitude to discomfort; then, the sheer relief of sitting down honestly starts to feel like ecstasy.
To really test your mettle, a good half of the clientele are Germans. To my shame, it appealed to the dark side of my nature to see a bunch of French people dressed up as American animals in order to entertain Germans. National pride, anyone?
There's a thing called Promenade Disney which really summed up the willingness of people to be taken - and love it. It's just a load of steps leading from the end of the Disney Village - a dirty great shopping mall, selling only Disney goods - to the hallowed precinct of the "Park" itself. For Fr595, you can get a pink granite paving stone engraved with your name, that is, you're paying for their pavement! "Become part of the legend of this fairytale world!" it says in the brochure. We had a good laugh at the names - Bill Balfanz, Peter Barker Swavesey and best of all The FDC Muck Family. Muck, apparently, is a very common surname in Germany. It brought a whole new meaning to the cliche that where there's Muck, there's brass. It's Bosnia for me next year, I think.