I fell down a proper internet rabbit hole during my tea break behind the counter this afternoon. Someone was reminiscing about a Dutch entrepreneur named Hennie van der Most, who bought up old industrial sites and turned them into indoor wonderlands—including an old potato starch factory transformed into an amusement park called Speelstad Oranje. I mean, the sheer, beautiful ambition of looking at a cavernous shed and thinking, *“Aye, what this needs is a pirate ship and a rollercoaster,”* is just fierce.

It gave me an immediate, sharp pang of nostalgia for the kinds of places we all loved as kids. Not the polished, hyper-corporate mega-resorts where you book ride slots on an app, but the gloriously eccentric, slightly clunky spots held together by fresh paint, sticky candyfloss, and pure optimism.

Growing up in the west, my brother Cian and I thought the absolute height of glamour was the seasonal funfair near Salthill, or the slightly battered amusement arcades where half the machines ate your 20p coins. Dad still talks about family trips to Mosney back in the day with that exact same dreamy look in his eye. There was always a ghost train where the most terrifying part was the rattling sound of the tracks, but when you were eight, you genuinely wouldn't have traded it for the world.

There’s something deeply lovely about people who dream up those odd, chaotic little havens for ordinary families. Even when time catches up with them, the memories never really fade.

Did you have an eccentric local theme park or seaside arcade like that when you were small? The kind that was a bit rough around the edges, but pure magic all the same?