Surfing the web is good. Especially good when you find things out that you didn’t know before. Take Monday morning for instance - there I was having a quick browse before heading off to work when I noticed Tewkesbury Mop Fair was happening that evening. Apparently the Danters were attending, which couldn’t be bad news, so off I trotted later that day.
For those uneducated in such matters, Mop Fairs date back 700 years, traditionally held in many English towns around Michaelmas Day. Farm workers, craftsmen and servants would attend, carrying an item signifying their trade. Those with no specific skills would carry a mop head, hence Mop Fair. Employers would mingle with the crowds, discussing terms and hiring staff for the coming year. People who had been hired would be given a small token amount of money by their new boss, replace the item signifying their trade with bright coloured ribbons, then spend their new found wealth at the fair sideshows and stalls.
Tewkesbury still holds its Mop Fair annually, with a focus rather more on the sideshows and rides rather than doing business deals. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing when examples of some of the best rides in the country attend of course!
The fair seemed to take over the entirety of Tewkesbury Continue reading ‘Tewkesbury Mop Fair’
Today was the annual Village Flower Show - the day of the year where you walk around charity stalls, wonder exactly how safe/unsafe Guyatt’s fair is this year and how long they can keep the same rusting rides running, sweat it out in the tents looking at row upon row of exhibits and of course meet all the people you only see once a year at the Show.
This year I entered a few photos and I won a couple of prizes:
I got a Second in class 220:
220. Photograph - any subject - black and white
and a Third in class 228:
228. My favourite Holiday Photograph - colour
Here are my other entries:
224. Photograph - people - colour
225. Photograph - places - colour
226. Photograph - animals - colour
232. Three photographs to illustrate a Theme - mounted on one piece of card, titled on front, overall size 360 sq ins, eg 20″x18″ or 30″x12″
I’m off to celebrate with my substantial cash prizes…
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.
New Year�s Eve � mankind�s obsession with time once again rears its head, unless you�re Chinese of course in which case you�ve got a few more weeks of the old year left before you have to give up smoking, go on a diet and join a gym for three or four days.
So what�s a boy to do at this junction between past and future, where destiny and eternity collide in some souped-up nano-metric partitron accelertronic munching machine? Well, clearly from the perfuse usage of tautologous verbalisms, he�s not feeling quite himself. Must be the off-season. A cure for off-season blues? A fair. Or an affair. But in this case, a fair.
That then was the plan. I�d meet up with Paul and Richard in London for a visit to London�s Fair on New Year�s Eve in Hyde Park.
Before the fun of the fair began, however, we needed to bring down the excitement levels somewhat, so after meeting at Waterloo we took the tube to Baker Street. Nay, not because any of our great aunt�s step-father�s inheritance had disappeared and we needed a top fictional private investigator and doctor duo to investigate. Our plans were more glorious than that. We were going to see the Queen. 
And Diana. And President Bush. And Tony Blair. And Saddam Hussein, Henry VIII, David Beckham, Kylie, Marilyn Monroe, Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Jackson, TPT, Michael Caine, etc., etc. Yes, we were going to Madame Tussaud�s palace of wonder and wax.
It�s been a few months since I last visited, sorry, queued through, Madame T�s. Bits and pieces of the attraction are constantly changing � notable this time were the Christmas Nativity and the X-Factor stage � but the whole place needs drastic re-working to cope with the seemingly ever-increasing crowds.
I�m pretty sure the Chamber of Horrors has been juggled around, with Chamber Live being extended. It�s getting less rather than more scary though. I remember the days where the actors would properly interact with you, one of the most memorable being the woman with the dead baby screaming �my baby, my baby� who would chat if you engaged her. Now the actors just stand, stare and occasionally squawk and jump out at you. Come on MT, remove the �actors will not touch you� restriction. Make it proper spine-chilling.
Spirit of London was its usual self, made more interesting by doing it twice in succession (our slightly sarcastic over-enthusiasm upon disembarking led to us being told about a secret passageway allowing access back to the ride entrance). If that was not enough entertainment, Paul & I managed to listen to the soundtrack in German. Twice. Es war sehr informativ.
Tussauds sometimes get a lot of stick, but they do get some things right. When they ordered their new stationery and coffee from Viking, they obviously got a dictionary as a free gift. This has allowed them to look up the word �planetarium� and see that it means a building housing an optical device for projecting images of celestial bodies and other astronomical phenomena onto a domed ceiling, rather than either a cinema for showing films on the ceiling forcing audiences to look up and get neck ache, or a cheaply produced stage show with dodgy actors pretending to be ancient warriors who (the audience is told) shouldn�t really fight anyway because it�s naughty.
Yes, a space-related show is back. Don�t expect anything too advanced though. Rather than the 30 minute edutainment shows of old, this is barely a ten minute tour through the solar system and then out into the universe on a Journey to Infinity. The new DigiStar 3 logo at the beginning is impressive though.
Overall, Madame Tussaud�s has become a place where entertainment for simpletons is placed just below the chance to make a quick buck by ripping off tourists with overpriced cameras and confectionary at every turn. Gone, at least for now, are the days where the displays were pitched above the lowest common denominator. The historical figures � once the staple of the attraction � now sit awkwardly alongside Kylie�s bum and Simon Cowell�s criticisms. It�s true that in these celebrity-obsessed times people expect more than simple waxwork figures and Madame Tussaud�s must reinvent itself to stay viable. That, though, doesn�t necessarily have to come at the cost of its heritage and reputation well earned over the last two centuries.
Exiting the rapidly melting wax house, we made our way on foot to the Marble Arch end of Hyde Park via a quick stop off for lunch. Why walk? Bob Crow and his crazy gang decided they wanted some time off to celebrate the New Year. Rather than just taking a day�s paid holiday, they decided it would be even better to complain about the lousiness of the deal they struck with London Underground this time last year so they could go out on strike, bringing the whole tube network to a halt. As we�ll see later though, (insert your desired adjective to describe the RMT leader here) Mr Crow didn�t plan his disruption very well, meaning it didn�t have anywhere near the effect it should have.
In late December 1999, The Mall became the venue for a fair to welcome in the new millennium, a year early depending on your view as to when it actually began. The fair was run by Big Time Events Ltd, a consortium of three of the UK�s major operators (Joseph Manning, George Irvin and Willie Wilson) set up especially for the occasion. This Christmas Big Time Events was back, this time in partnership with the Royal Parks operating London�s Fair on North Carriage Drive in Hyde Park.
Those who know the area will know the quaint little network of subways under Marble Arch well. Ok, so quaint isn�t the right word. Dirty, smelly and dangerous may be more appropriate. Therefore, seeing big yellow signs directing you to London�s Fair via a �safe pedestrian route� were a welcome sight, the three of us not wanting to be mugged before the ride ops relieved us of our coinage.
Actually, price-wise the fair was extremely reasonable. Most rides were �2-2.50, with only the low-capacity booster at �5 (about the price you�d pay for a quickie on the carousel down our way). (Don�t be rude, I saw that smirk).
Our first destination was Abe Danter�s Wild Mouse. As far as I could make out, this is a standard Reverchon Compact Spinning Coaster, albeit propped up on some rather slim and high piles of wood. After a sluggish start, when the car unlocked it spun with vigour more akin to a waltzer than a coaster. Whhheeeeeeeee�..
Realising that we probably should have been a little more careful in the timing of our lunch arrangements, we elected to walk the length of the fair to see what else was on offer. We ended up down near Lancaster Gate with the Booster towering high above. Richard said was keen to ride, but Paul and I were definitely going nowhere near. We decided to go back later for Richard to have a go, but somehow he managed to forget ;-).
Next to the booster was something much more appropriate: Dragon. Modelled on the fire-breathing beast of ye olde legend, it was certainly a formidable ride for the uninitiated. Fortunately, we�d all ridden something similar earlier in the year at Flamingo Land. Pitying these three poor misguided adults approaching his pay kiosk, the ride op let us on for free.
Making our way back up towards Marble Arch, next up for the taking was that traditional funfair attraction, the Ghost Train. That was an over-optimistic description of this ride though. �Train ride through pitch blackness while your head is brushed by somebody�s washing and then encountering a solitary model that lit up until you were close enough to see it at which point its light was extinguished� would have been more appropriate. Eternally missable, meaning all so-called scary experiences of the day were a let down (being the ghost train, Chamber Live and the walk through the wee-smelling maze of subways under Marble Arch).
Feeling that our digestive systems had probably had enough time to recover by that point, we naively ventured onto a superbob ride with no discernable name, its outer shell instead covered with warning signs about the dangers of not sitting properly and the management�s reluctance to take responsibility for any injuries sustained by riders. Oh, and no refunds.
After riding it, I can think of a good name: Extreme Pain. Unwisely, Paul and I shared a car, resulting in me spending the ride attempting to avoid being crushed whilst Paul almost pulled his arms from their sockets trying to stop himself flying into me/out of the car.
We unwittingly once again became human adverts on Bob Wilson�s Superbowl: we were the only ones riding and made one heck of a noise, resulting in a rather long ride cycle to the point where boredom set in. 
There�s only so much fun you can have pretending to be an American football.
Paul declined the opportunity to ride Move It. Not much liking the ride myself, I wasn�t too sure about riding either. Richard used his Jedi mind tricks on me though, forcing me to walk on without even realising what I was doing. As a change to Richard�s usual �come on you�ll like it�-style ride picks (ahem, Pandemonium, ahem), it turned out not to be too bad.
Dance Crazy (Jason Price�s Crazy Frog) was cool, the Midnight Express matterhorn was not. It was old and creaky. Then again, as we were leaving the fair it looked like it had begun to run well, throwing the cars out horizontally. Too bad we just got the kiddie-ride chugging around mode.
We saved the best for last: Chaos. I love Afterburners and, after first riding Chaos in Cardiff in August I was looking forward to some repeat rides in London. Chaos delivered again, its mad variety of swing and spin offering plenty of Gs and airtime. The only thing letting it down was the short ride cycle, vastly reduced from the summer.
As the sun set on the last day of 2005 (aww, how poetic), we made our way back to Waterloo and our trains home. Due to the aforementioned (insert random insult if desired) Bob Crow�s men in tights, we had to walk most of the way after being informed by a staff member at Hyde Park Corner that trains were running but not stopping at all stations, so it was a risk whether we�d be able to get off anything we got on. As it turned out, he was talking out of the terminal portion of his large intestine. After checking the list of closed stations and finding no more than a handful of important ones (none of which were out of walking distance from another anyway), we caught a tube from Westminster without any problems. [marvin]Yes, I know. Westminster. Don�t say it would have been quicker to walk. That�s what I said. But nobody listens to me. Here I am, brain the size of a planet…[/marvin]
So I managed to extend this year�s coaster riding season right to the end of the year in some excellent company. And it has been a very good coaster-riding year too. The next one begins in a few days, in yet more excellent company!
Trip photos are available here
