We arrived at Meadowhall on Saturday afternoon excited, and in hindsight, a little naive. When we arrived we were a little taken aback by the lack of, well the lack of meadow(hows that for false advertising!). But despite the slight oversight on our part we decided that we would go ahead with our day out. After all, Meadowhall is quite a way to go just to come home without doing anything.

After wandering around taking in the sights, the sounds and, I have to say, the horrible smell of fat emanating from a restaurant called Mc.. Mc something, I’m not sure, anyway after that; we found a lovely seating area and sat down for our picnic. We got out our coffee, our cucumber sandwiches, and our knitting, and began to relax and enjoy the day. (Gosh doesn’t sitting in an enclosed, busy, bustling place like that give you a real feel for how enjoyable shopping actually is?) Before long we were giving away our sandwiches to hungry shoppers deprived of food, “don’t buy any we’ve got plenty of cucumber sandwiches to go around!”. I was surprised that people didn’t seem very interested, they were nice sandwiches!

When most of our sandwiches were gone (and my friend had proceeded to do a few more rows of knitting) we set up our game of Jenga and tried to get the shoppers to join in. Once again I was surprised at how little interest people had in our generosity. I couldn’t understand it, a FREE game of Jenga, when every single thing around them costs money and no-one joined in. Oh well, we had fun: that was until the security guards decided that playing Jenga was dangerous and made us move along. It wasn’t fair that we couldn’t finish our game though...

But we did as we were told of course, we weren’t there to cause trouble.

We milled around for a while, then we hit the oasis, which is not particularly oasis-like I have to say(I suppose once again we are mislead by the name). We were looking for a place to sit when my pick-up-sticks ‘slipped’ out of my hand onto the floor. Well of course they had to be picked up but, well they were on the floor already and it seemed such a shame to pick them up without playing the rules.. So, there we were, picking up our sticks very, very carefully, “erm excuse me you know you aren’t allowed to - oh, your just picking them up, OK.”, one by one, “Yes I won! Ha!”. What fun!

We sat down and shared our coffee and biscuits with the shoppers, once again, the security guards came to bother us, “your not allowed to give things to people”. We simply tried to explain that they weren’t poisoned and that we were just giving them things out of generosity, but that didn't go down well, “If you don’t stop it you’ll be thrown out”. And so the inevitable, we were thrown out of meadowhall, with not a penny spent! That was our grand day out!

It wasn’t quite the “picnic in the park” we were looking for but we didn’t spend any money and we may have even got other people to at least think about not spending money too.