Staring into space in Burger King

Once again, on Friday evening, I found myself surrounded by yelling, screaming weans. Ka and myself were sitting at a table in a busy Burger King, munching on cold fries waiting on Morgan.
The EK Burger King has a soft play area in one corner, where kids can climb and slide about the padded scaffolding. This, together with the idea of a tasty burger, became the perfect place to take our niece, Morgan, for dinner on the way back to ours on Friday night for a sleepover.
While I was sliding around the fries on the floor, trying to describe the various meals we had decided upon to the staff, I remembered why I hate fast food restaurants. Kids yelled from the soft play area in the corner of the burger joint, at each other and to their parents sitting in the surrounding tables. Most of these parents seemed to be Dads sitting alone which made me wonder. Were they Dads simply wanting to take their kid out for a treat, maybe get them out of the Mum's way for a bit on a Friday night? Dads that had been left with their kid while the Mum hit the town? Or maybe they were rarely seen Dads that had their child for the night, or the weekend, and had to find a quick, easy and entertaining way of feeding them. Either way, it was quite a sad sight. Another one of those "is this what I have to look forward to?!" moments.
They patiently waited, staring into space as their child yelled for them. As I waited in the Burger King queue, I'm sure one of the Dads didn't even notice a 'Cats and Dogs' kids meal toy bounce off his head as he sat in mid trance.
After opening our meals to find two out of three were wrong, I successfully made enemies with some of the members of staff by sending them back and asking for what I had actually asked for in the first place, Morgan nearly disowning me after getting something called 'chicken popcorn' instead of her usual small chicken burger type meal.
Immediately after finishing our niece sped off, leaving Ka and myself sitting mopping up what was left of the vast amounts of tomato sauce with fries that were growing colder and colder by the minute. Morgan disappeared into the padded climbing frames that was the soft-play area almost instantly introducing herself to various little kids.
After around five minutes of cold chip eating, Morgan ran back up and informed me of a bad boy somewhere in the depths of the foam padded construction who was saying naughty words and pushing folk about. Ka told Morgan to simply stay away from the boy in question. Not particularly satisfied with this answer Morgan looked at me questioningly, obviously disappointed in the lukewarm response she had got from us with her breaking newsflash. I simply nodded, agreeing with Ka's advice. Morgan huffed with a slight frown, realising at that moment who was in charge and that she was fighting a hopeless cause, and ran away and back into the belly of the softplay beast, through the mirrors and netting.
What had she expected me to do exactly? Square up to some four year old wee guy? Even if I had I would have probably ended up getting hooked by him or by some angry Dad sitting somewhere in the surrounding chaos of the restaurant, stirred out of his stupor by the promise of a fight with a scrawny Uncle in glasses. He would have been glad of the excitement. Me? I was just glad when we got out of there.