In the words of Jim Royle: "Impressive sculptures my a**e."

At least I'm sure that's what the outspoken Liverpudlian would have said had he accompanied me and my family to the latest exhibition in the huge Turbine Hall at London's Tate Modern.

We had read about them before our visit and seen them on TV, and to be honest, the new artwork' looked like a collection of tubular slides not dissimilar to those you find in any leisure centre in any provincial town across the country. There's one in our own Richard Dunn Sports Centre. Not quite as high, but a slide all the same.

And so it turned out, the Tate slides were indeed, just that, slides. Nothing out of the ordinary. Higher than your average slides, because it's a high space, but at the end of the day they were simply slides.

Yet the queues were enormous. Men, women, children, snaking for miles to have a go on them.

Like so much of what nowadays passes for art, it was a clear case of The Emperor's New Clothes. Even my children couldn't see the point. "Why have they put slides in here?" asked one, "These people are going to be here all day and all night," said the other.

It was the second artistic let-down during our short stay in the capital. The previous day we had visited the famous Princess Diana Fountain which, everyone agreed, was more like a drain. It ruins what would previously have been a lovely bit of grass beside the Serpentine.

The lake nearby was also blighted by a piece of so-called art. This exhibit brought the cry from my children: "Mum, someone's dumped lots of rubbish in the water."

And that's what it looked like - rubbish. Until you got up close - then it looked like bits of coloured papier mache. I would never have guessed that it was, in reality, a jewel-encrusted island sculpture to suggest the formation and blooming of living islands of algal inflorescence'. But then, I'm often wrong when it comes to art.

The stuff I tend to dismiss as rubbish - unmade beds, lines of light bulbs, piles of bricks - is usually cooed over by half the world's population.

Most people, I believe, are like sheep, who simply oooh and aaah and are afraid to speak out if they don't like something. They stroll around trendy galleries and may hate the exhibits, but they're also desperate to be part of the arty in-crowd, and don't want to be seen as ignorant, ill-educated and unappreciative.

The week before I set eyes on the slides, I'd watched the play Art, about a man who pays a lot of money for a plain white canvas. His best friend thinks he's wasted his money on rubbish, and the pair, along with a third friend, fall out.

I'm surprised the Tate wasn't full of warring families, with dad rubbishing the sculptures', and mum ferociously guarding her place in the queue. Or vice versa. But, it seemed, we were the only baffled customers.

Maybe we are the weird ones. Maybe bog-standard slides are art. I might pop to the Richard Dunn pool and have a closer look.