‘The kids went to a city farm to… ride go-karts?’

“Let’s take you off and get the hang of this,” I say, slowly shepherding him off the track. Terrified that I’m about to teach him something, he hops out and marches off to another attraction so that no information can be exchanged. I don’t mind since there’s so much more to see and do. We are, after all, on a farm.

I grew up around farmland and don’t remember it being lousy with go-karts, nor most of the other attractions available at Bocketts Farm Park in Surrey, where my sister Dearbhaile and her family are accompanying us for the day. There are animals here, of course: rabbits and birds, cows and sheep. There are guinea pigs you can pet, ponies you can ride and pigs you can watch race (I backed Jack Squealish, my wife Hugh Grunt).

It’s an ingenious way of turning the attractions of a farm into something resembling a theme park. It’s just that my own city-bound children probably now think this is what all farms are like. In a sense, they regard animals as characters from fiction, which might be why they take one of the farm’s other main attractions – a special appearance by Bluey (from Bluey) and Bingo (also from Bluey) – entirely in their stride.

We enter another, more amiable, queue to meet the pair, and soon we’re right there with them. My daughter and her cousin Ailbhe react as if they’re meeting the Beatles in 1963, but my son and his cousin Daniel are rather more guarded. At seven and eight respectively, they’re at an unfortunate crossroads: slightly too old to rejoice at the thought of meeting two fare workers dressed up as amiable Australian dog cartoons, just young enough to, shortly afterwards, feel slightly bummed out that they didn’t take the chance.

While I didn’t experience much go-karting in my rural upbringing, I realise now that my childhood was filled with appearances by famous children’s characters, many in costumes which exhibited an attitude to copyright that might charitably be described as casual. Any trip to a funfair or sports day was reliably enlivened by some teacher or council worker dressed up as Fireman Sam or Paddington Bear, at a time when the reach of rights-holding media titans was – like Waitrose or the correct broadcasting time of Match of the Day – simply not something that extended to Northern Ireland. What these performances lacked in appropriate legal clearances, however, they made up for with a zesty absence of professionalism. I don’t think I ever encountered one of these mascots who didn’t end up swearing a lot and doing as many of their tasks as possible sitting down, once the rigours of actually walking around in a costume became hatefully apparent.

To this day, any time I see people engaging in mascot work, I’m enthralled. My first consideration, obviously, is how they’re seeing out of that thing. I can’t relax until I’ve clocked where their eyes are, and through which partially obscured section of their giant head – and sometimes body – said aperture is located. This is particularly prevalent when it comes to cartoon characters who were clearly only ever designed for a flat plane and thus cut an odd figure in three dimensions. Anyone who has seen the oblique horror of someone dressed as Peppa Pig – a character exclusively depicted in profile – wearing a real-life head that looks like a travel hair dryer designed by Hieronymus Bosch, will know what I mean.

To be honest, I don’t ever fully relax around these guys. Especially not when, as is the case today, the heat is stifling enough that I’m pulling a flop sweat in shorts and a T-shirt. To see someone gambolling around in a 50lb cage made from fur and body heat sets me on an anxiety spiral I find hard to dispel. I like to imagine that such outfits are now well-ventilated, with cooling systems and even discreet fans. But some part of me never quite banishes the fear that I’m five minutes away from watching a giant, spongy rendering of a beloved character keel over from heatstroke, in full view of a room of screaming children.

Thankfully, this doesn’t come to pass. We take a picture and my daughter beams like she’s had an audience with the Pope. We move on to pet some guinea pigs. My sister finds a goat. I talk to a bird. When it’s time to go, my son sidles up to me and asks if we can try the go-karting again.

“Not this time,” I tell him, gently, “but there’ll be other farms.”