We are on our way to Flamingo Land in North Yorkshire, tempted on this sunny Easter holiday Wednesday by the lure of white-knuckle rides, wild animals and animatronic dinosaurs that move a bit.

It is also Mrs B’s birthday, and I figure that if she is kept busy dealing with the children’s numerous requests throughout the day it will distract her from the thorny question of why, for around the 14th year running, she has not been taken to Barcelona or somewhere equally exotic and cultured for her big day.

There is plenty to keep us busy on the journey, though, as before we have even left the Bradford district boundary the boy has violently thrown up three times. As he is not ill, we put this down to a sudden bout of early morning motion sickness from jogging along bumpy roads too soon after breakfast. It does not bode well for the white-knuckle rides, however.

Despite my own vision of myself as something of a thrill-seeking adrenaline junkie like a cross between Indiana Jones and Patrick Swayze in Point Break, I do get a bit of a yawning feeling in the pit of my stomach when we finally arrive and look up at the tangled knots of rollercoaster track that seem to reach up into the clouds.

“This one has the world record for the steepest drop ever,” says the girl, reading from a plaque.

“What a shame, it doesn’t seem to be working,” I say, trying to distract them from the line of people forming at the rollercoaster. “Must be too early in the day. Or the season. Oh, look, the dinosaurs are over there.”

We head over and stand and watch a robotic Triceratops that shakes its head sadly at me, as though disapproving of my sudden cowardice when it comes to heart-stoppingly terrifying rides. We all pile on a gentle ride that goes about 8ft in the air and round and round at a sedate pace.

As the boy has been sick on the journey, we all agree to start off by taking it a bit easy, but the time comes when Mrs B is looking longingly at what looks like a pair of giant hammers whizzing around. “Right,” she says, “we’re going on that.”

We queue up and me and the boy get the last seats. It is as ghastly as I fear. It goes over slowly at first, which makes you think you are going to fall out, then with increasing speed which makes you think you are going to lose your eyeballs.

“You looked terrified,” Mrs B laughs after we disembark.

“I was worried about the boy,” I say hurriedly, though he was absolutely fine.

As we are queuing for the log flume and watching a parade of utterly drenched people walk off it, the girl notices that there are people on the really big rollercoaster.

“They must have just opened it,” I say. “There isn’t time to go on now. Shame.”

However, it does look like fun. As we scream our way into the tsunami of the log flume, I promise myself that next time we’ll go on the really scary one, and wet through or not, I won’t be such a drip.