Rory Sutherland

You won’t know it, but a school trip will be the best day of your life

  • From Spectator Life

‘We need 800 words on a memorial school trip by next Friday. And Taki’s already written one.’ As soon as I agreed to this commission, I started to worry. What if Taki’s childhood involved countless trips to Penscynor Wildlife Park, St Fagans Museum of Welsh Things or Wookey Hole? There would be a risk of repetition. After some reflection, I decided this was unlikely.

I had even gingerly lowered the rear step of the minibus to maximise the resulting damage

Unlike Longstanton Spice Museum, which is an Alan Partridge invention, Penscynor Wildlife Park, though now defunct, actually existed. It is surprising that it failed financially, since it must have made several million pounds a year from the sale of car stickers alone. For a decade or more in the 1970s and 1980s, it was basically a DVLA mandate that every car in south Wales carry a sticker in the rear window confirming the owner had been there.

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