Ben Machell takes his brood on the happy train to Greenwich

Another hot summer weekend, another family day trip.

High on the (relative) success of our Hampton Court excursion — awkward questions about beheading and the general unpleasantness of early-modern life — we doubled down and decided to take our small children to Greenwich.

Greenwich! Finally! I don’t think there’s anywhere in London we’ve talked about visiting so much without ever actually getting around to visiting as Greenwich. ‘Perhaps we should go to Greenwich’ had become one of our stock empty refrains, up there with ‘Perhaps we should buy electric toothbrushes’ or ‘Perhaps we should take the cat to the vet’. But now, for the first time ever, we were off.

My dad came along, too. What have we become, I wondered? We looked like one of those families you see on posters in tourist information offices or on pamphlets for group rail cards. Smiling and pointing. Pointing and smiling. We took the Docklands Light Railway and, obviously, I wanted to take my three-year-old son to the very front so that he/we/I could pretend to be driving it. I was absolutely disgusted to discover that a group of adults — adults! — had taken all the front seats. So I just stood near them, held my son and loudly whispered that he didn’t need to be sad and didn’t need to cry — even though he was totally fine — until a woman and her boyfriend did the honourable thing and gave us their seats. Choo choo! I drove us the rest of the way.

And Greenwich? It was lovely. Top class. We did the Cutty Sark, which is, quite simply, a quality clipper. It did seem a bit of a shame to have it stuck on land, and they should consider letting it out now and then to buzz up and down the Thames Estuary. But other than that, no complaints. Then it was up to Greenwich Park, to gorge ourselves on a picnic of M&S Simply Food goodies. It was the sort of thing that Samuel Pepys would have done, minus the cold samosas and crisps. We wandered about. We took a look at the prime meridian line, although my dad, who was visiting from Up North, was unmoved. ‘You can see that at Grimsby fish docks,’ he said. ‘Runs right through them.’

It was a sign, I think, that everyone was getting tired. We trudged back to the DLR. ‘Don’t worry, Dad,’ I said. ‘Next time we’ll go to Grimsby.’