There’s a place near our house where Mama and I often go to while away time on the way back from dropping off my Brilliant Big Brother at school, or when waiting for him to finish sitting on people at JuJitsu, or just because its sheer brilliance calls to us and it is raining. It’s a huge cave of wonders full of shiny things, exotic plants, thrilling computer games, colourful soft furnishings, thoughtful short films, well maintained race tracks, beautiful samples of crafting paper, giant wendy houses stuffed with really cool furniture, none of your cheap plastic tat, and it even has a thrilling fairground ride.
Its name is Homebase and I really love it.
The first thing that makes Homebase the perfect preschooler hangout is that on a weekday it is almost deserted. As long as I don’t go mad and try to break the land speed record for someone on a Minimicro, nobody seems to mind me puttering around its acres of splendidly wide aisles to my heart’s content so Mama’s normal ban on such things is relaxed.
Even better though is that Homebase has the kind of professionally smoothed plastic flooring that means I can glide with the merest of featherlight pushes. Delightful.
Another thing I like are the funky interior decorating games on the touch screens. You pick your room, select your paint colours and go wild! Lately I have also been getting well into selecting my flooring and pimping the furniture too. Perhaps one day I will persuade Mama to bring in pictures of our actual house, just like the game suggests, for me to have fun with. I am sure we can do better than Mama’s current choice of mainly mushroom throughout.
I’ve managed to get her to pick up a few samples of wallpaper before, but what usually happens is that Mama suffers a crisis of confidence in our choice of teal with pops of scarlet and turns it all into a craft project.
There is a reason why this is not a home and interiors blog, and the other one is that Mama has been trying to choose the right floor standing lamp for about eight years, but despite numerous excursions around the section of the store that is forever celebrating something with its joyful mishmash of all possibly lighting designs, she hasn’t been able to settle on one yet.
The only niggle I have with the computers is that for some reason these play stations have been placed inconveniently high up from the point of view of a four year old. However! This problem is usually solved by means of a handy chair to stand on. Or there’s always Mama to pick me up. Still, you’d think Homebase’d find it easier just to put them where its main customer base could easily get at them.
When gaming palls, there is always… the lift! It’s one of those ones where you get to operate the elevation machinery yourself, which always makes for a fabulously exciting ride, even if it is also extremely slow. Actually, I think that the building anticipation of getting to the top brought about by travelling at roughly the speed of a very tardy snail crawling up a wall is part of the fun. I am ready to explode when we finally get to step out!
And I am rewarded! At the top of the lift are the full sized toy kitchens, living rooms and bathrooms. Amazing number and wonderful variety of drawers to open and close, open and close, open and close! Mama really gets into the play opportunities alongside me here. She seems fascinated by the doors where you can pull out double the number of shelves from inside a seemingly small cupboard. It’s her love of Doctor Who and the TARDIS I expect, although she also enjoys gazing wistfully into the really giant fridges. I can see why. There’s never anything in them! That would make anyone sad.
That said, I am always a bit disappointed that the experience of finding a whole bunch of sweets waiting for us up there has not been repeated since the mince pie, mulled wine and chocolates excitement of Christmas. I thought we’d struck lucky again last week, because there was a large vase full of marshmallows in exactly the same place the Quality Streets were yuletide. It turned out that you were not supposed to eat them but guess how many there were inside. Huge let down. No idea what prize could possibly be more exciting than getting to eat the squidgy goodness, preferably with cocoa.
Not that I will be getting any cocoa as Homebase inexplicably does not contain a cafe. There is a hot drinks vending machine, and a burger van in the carpark too, but somehow this is not the same, especially as for some reason you are not able to make use of all the lovely sofas, armchairs, breakfast bars, garden furniture, dining rooms sets or even the large number of broken toilets that litter Homebase in order to have a nice sit down when you consume your purchase. This is a great shame in my opinion.
My Tremendous Big Brother likes the documentaries that are shown on screens scattered throughout Homebase. He was particularly taken by the one about the nifty new invention you can use to wash your feet while in the shower without having to do any bending. It’s a plastic slipper! But it’s also a brush! And more! You can buy them in Homebase! How cool is that? My Tremendous Big Brother was insistent for weeks that this was what he wanted for his birthday. In the end, the slipperbrushes lost out to more soft toy animals. It was a close run thing though.
And we do buy some things at Homebase, although that’s obviously not the main purpose of the place. Especially at Christmas. For some reason, Homebase celebrates the festive season two weeks in advance of everybody else, and takes away all its decorations down straight after. That’s OK, because they practically give away all their fairy lights, holly shaped banners and glass baubles at exactly the time when Mama is just thinking about putting our shiny things up, and so we invariably find ourselves with a large bag of new Santa shaped items for what Mama describes smugly as mere pennies.
But Mama really likes their outdoor garden area too and so too do our balcony window boxes. Bulbs, herbs, tomatoes and lots and lots of small mixnmatch flowers are what we are into. Every year we buy more and more. I think Mama is going for the record of how many plants she can cram into one small terracotta trough. It probably would just be easier to get Mama an allotment, but that might require her to learn more about gardening than just the ability to shove things other people have grown into compost and water them regularly. I do not think that is going to happen, frankly. Mama can barely cope with indoor houseplants requiring a year-round commitment.
I am prepared to tolerate the living things section because there is quite a high possibility that when we go there, somebody might be spraying water around. And my Tremendous Big Brother, ever the art lover, likes the animal sculptures. Not quite as much as he likes the door stopper shelf though. Massively heavy cuddly toy heaven!
Homebase, then, has a wide variety of attractions for all the family and deserves your consideration as a going out venue, not merely a place to pop to if you are in need of some mouse traps, cement, sand or a replacement peace lily. Go for it!
More Information
Address: A big box retail park near you throughout the UK.
Opening: Typically, 9am to 9pm Monday to Saturday and 11am to 4pm Sunday. Some stores have slightly longer hours.
Admission: Free! To get in.
By car: Even in London, Homebase stores have decent amounts of free parking.