Sunday evening teatime is when BBC ONE enters the God-slot with Songs of Praise. It’s certainly entertaining, with Aled Jones (the Walking in the Air guy, remember him?) or Pam Rhodes taking us around some parish church or great cathedral for a fantastic sing song by nicely dressed middle aged folk (almost certainly most of whom are not exactly what you might call regular attendees) with lips that don’t move in time with the lyrics.
Yet for all it is, there’s something missing … alcohol. Just imagine how much more lively the programme would be!
But imagine no longer friends, for the singing of ye ancient hymns and the drinking of ye ancient organic ales is a reality. At least, it was last night at Greenbelt’s beer tent (aptly named The Jesus Arms).
In true Songs of Praise style, you too can join in by watching my camera phone’s take on the event. Look out for the particularly raucous rendition of Jerusalem at the end of the evening! In the interests of decency, I’ve edited out the reaction of the, erm, congregation/customers, when they tried to make us sing Shine Jesus Shine. Oh, come on…
Flying is fun. Dublin is fun. Fairs are fun. Catching a quick flight from Bristol to Dublin to go to the fair should be fun.
So here we are cruising at 60mph at an altitude of 6ft along the M4. In a coach. Towards Heathrow. Totally the opposite direction to Dublin.
You see Bristol airport have been spending their Christmas money (�17m of it) resurfacing their runway. With slippery tarmac.
easyJet cancelled their flights out of Bristol saying they were concerned about safety. Now the other airlines have followed suit.
It’s a nice coach though. The driver’s said he’ll put it on autopilot and come around with the duty-free soon. I half suspect he might be serious. But for now he remains safely in the front seat driving us through the fog towards Heathrow.
Fog. Heathrow. Oh crap.
And don’t anybody dare mention luggage mountain.
The weekend before Christmas I went down to Cardiff to visit the fair inside the Millennium Stadium with Tom.
click here for all the fair photos After the fair we killed a few hours in Cardiff by going down to Cardiff Bay, visiting the Doctor Who exhibition, watching Eragon at the cinema (nice music and scenery, rubbish story) and eating a Pizza Express.
Continue reading ‘Torchwood afFair’
Any idea what this is? An exclusive still from an upcoming Doctor Who episode perhaps?
No - this is actually a close-up view of one of the Shivering Sands towers, part of one of a series of forts placed off the Kent coast to provide protection for the Thames Estuary against enemy aircraft activity during the Second World War.
I recently went as part of a group of 11 people to tour three of these forts onboard a RIB - quite an experience in itself, especially crossing the wakes of some of the huge container ships!
It was also the first outing for my new camera and I’m very pleased with the results - the photos are now online as is a video of the trip.
Hywel, who deserves a lot of credit for organising the trip, has also got some great photos.
Ireland is known for a lot of things: leprechauns, green objects and friendly people to name just tree (plus, as we discovered this weekend, it’s the land where lifts on the lowest floor of buildings only have down buttons and the ground floor is labelled �-1� instead of �G�). But say Ireland to most people and thrill rides and rollercoasters will not immediately spring to mind. Why then, in the first few days of the new year, would 18 coaster enthusiasts congregate in Dublin? Well two of them live there, 15 were there to laugh at my driving skills and one was me. Q.E.D.
Then of course there is Funderland, a fair held annually at the RDS in Dublin. That was the principal excuse for the trip, but it was more about having an out-of-season meetup.
The weekend started for me on Friday afternoon at Heathrow Terminal 1 waiting for my flight to Dublin. Having found out the gates Air Lingus flights leave from, I now realise why my tickets were so cheap: Gates 80-90 are about the longest walk you can have from the departures hall. We left from Gate 88 - one short of Gate 90 (who stole Gate 89?).
A nice view of the sunset at 32,000ftAfter arriving at the hotel and Tom trying to convince the receptionist that he really did exist and that his name wasn’t Adrianne, we met up with the majority of the group for a meal at
Luigi Malones.
Huge pizzas … 
… and a small snack 
Look: George is wearing glasses We spent Saturday morning karting before moving onto the fair in the afternoon. I could perhaps say I didn’t do particularly well at that, but at least I didn’t come last in the quarters, semi-finals or final. It seems that if you manage to come last out of 18, you don’t make it past the first round. I think I’ve done a great service to you lot though - just read everybody else’s trip reports and you’ll never be short of any slow driver jokes or cheeky comments about picking up some groceries on the way round the track.
Look at those maniacs! I bet they aren’t even looking in their mirrors. After a quick shower, we all headed off to the fair. Funderland was much more impressive than I’d thought it would be. In addition to a host of rides inside the RDS, four lurked outside too: an observation wheel, a
spinning wild mouse, a log flume (yes in January, yes cold, yes bizarre choice) and Star Flyer.Star Flyer is the equivalent of a tiny portion of spaghetti on Ecstasy: thin and stringy, quickly finished, very high, and generally a very strange concept. Everybody’s seen wave swingers (nee chair-o-planes). Everybody’s seen drop towers. With Star Flyer, both can be seen without the need to adjust your field of view.
Star Flyer Star Flyer provided
Richard,
Tom and
Malcolm with an opportunity to play their new favourite game which they learnt
last year called
find a ride that keeps riders high up for a nice long time that you don’t think James will like and then stick him on it regardless of any protestations that he tries to issue forth. You can guess where I ended up.Oddly, I found I did actually enjoy the ride (I even relaxed my grip for all of 1 1/2 seconds), and was disappointed when we returned from the lofty heights. As everybody else has said, the ride cycle was far too short - even for me. Would I ride Star Flyer again? Yes, but don’t tell anybody or I’ll end up on something worse.
Outside the fair in the cool Dublin air 
A blurry combination of Richard’s fingers, Andrew and Richard 
I don’t think this even needs a caption More entertainment was waiting inside with a mixture of Irish-owned rides and rides that had been brought over especially from Germany, home of the legendary fairground thrill machines. A highlight among all of them was a Huss Booster which Tom was very keen on getting everybody to ride. It’s quite difficult to explain the ride, but luckily master-of-the-household-appliance-analogy Mr Marr managed to come up with the amazingly accurate comparison of sitting inside a washing machine attached to the end of a bungee chord. All I can add is that the washing machine was on the fast spin cycle.Other rides on offer included an insanely fast Matterhorn (but I’d have liked a longer ride cycle like the one I rode
in Greece), a massively fun Polyps called Power Wave, and a smooth but ugly Mr Blobby-esque coloured Pinfari ZL42 looping coaster named
Speed Loop.
Speed Loop barely fitted into the building 
We enjoyed the matterhorn … 
… even if somebody else didn’t The final ride of the day was on Take Off. If you’ve never seen one think spinning plus more spinning vertically. Basically, a G-machine. Those in the know said how much more intensely it was being run than on the German fair circuit. Extremely intense, extremely extreme. Extremely fun. Maybe not something I could ride many times in a day, but definitely something I want to ride again.
Expecting Johnny Vaughn to appear at any minute We spent the early part of Saturday evening at an Asian restaurant with a difference: Yes, not every restaurant has the likes of Taz (see below). The other, only slightly less remarkable difference was the cooking. Rather than meals appearing from the back kitchen, the food was prepared right on our table by a chef-come-entertainer-come-magician. It’s a unique experience and I don’t think you can get your food more freshly cooked!
Dining experience 
Cooking with fire 
Andy ordered ice cream for grown-ups The karting and fair, together with a couple of excellent meals and a lot of miscellaneous fun made this a great weekend away. A lot of thanks must go to Richard for organising the whole thing (and organising us lot cannot be particularly easy!) and also to the marketing manager at Funderland who generously provided us all with enough free ride tickets to cover everything we wanted to do. Even if it wasn’t for riding for free, I’d still be talking highly of Funderland. The fair was very well organised with a good atmosphere inside and some great rides mostly being run on long programs.
An unusual name for an airport cafe
Leaving on a jet plane… If
Aer Lingus would let me, I’d already be buying my plane ticket to return back next year.
I’ve finally finished with my photos from Greece, which can now be seen in the photo album.
