If you’ve never had a psychotropic drug experience, think of those dreams you get when you’ve got a fever: colours overwhelmingly bright, weird figures looming from nowhere. Three-foot-high mannequins of all nationalities (which remain resolutely Aryan despite different skin tones, idealised costumes and a rapid background progression from palm trees to Big Ben) pat their hands up and down as though manipulating a basketball and wag their heads smilingly from side to side in polite refusal, and things turn seriously trippy. You would get through a squeaky amount of laundry if you let every old slapper wipe her make-up all over your clothes.You see a lot of Goofy as well, of course, but somehow it’s hard to imagine a sap with floppy ears harbouring serious plans to dominate the world.But just wait for an hour for Space Mountain, another for Indiana Jones et le Temple du Peril Then take a boat ride through It’s a Small World. It’s that face: the raised eyebrows, the big eyes with their enlarged, interested pupils, the shared-joke grin. He came over to me, took my hand and raised it to his plastic lips.

I tried to return the compliment, feigning a kiss to his fingers, but he withdrew it, gently but firmly, before my red lipstick could besmirch the pristine white of his gloves Fair enough. He is everywhere: picked out, grinning maniacally, in flowers, on the approach to the 478- room, Fr1,995 a night Disneyland Hotel which overshadows the hallowed entrance to the park; capering around the open spaces, hugging little children, waving, posing for pictures; stacked sky-high on shelves in every shop, dancing as though he were doing the breaststroke in a drag queen’s fiesta shirt, followed by Mardi Gras chicks, their faces plastered with painted smiles.At first sight he was impressive: lovable even. It wasn’t that awareness of latent chaos one experiences in dangerous places, but the opposite: nothing in human life is so ordered, so clean, runs so exactly to timetable. You expect at any moment that the clocks will strike 13 and the television sets in the hotels start issuing orders.Uncle Walt died in 1966, but the Disney steamroller rolls inexorably forward. The advance may be peaceful, but the results will last a thousand years: longer, probably, given the amount of plastic used in the construction of the theme parks. Ten thousand years from now, when another civilisation has risen from the ashes of our own, archaeologists will uncover Sleeping Beauty’s Castle and the 56 hectares of domes, palaces, theatres and temples that surround it, and conclude that we had a mighty civilisation, execrable taste and an anthropomorphised Mouse God.It was the mouse, actually, that started the gnawing panic. This is roughly six hours per person per day spent shuffling through holding pens in the name of pleasure.

Only once have I had that much pleasure crammed into one day. I was taking O-level maths at the time.Disneyland Paris, so benign, so colourful, so safe, is also very scary if you’re prone to paranoia. I was quite sanguine when I saw a sign in a Manila hotel saying “gentlemen are requested to deposit their guns at the front desk”, but Disney awakened my urge to run and hide. That’s 6,000 years longer than Homo sapiens has taken to get from painting woolly mammoths on cave walls to worshipping Kylie Minogue. Screams echoed from this pit, accompanied by the rattle of machinery. On the far side of an artificial lake, trains whizzed round impossibly tight corners and disappeared in and out of tunnels, carrying a gleefully howling mob of thrill-seekers.