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…
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.
I’ve just got to grips with some media from trips to Thorpe in the last couple of weeks:
First of all there are arty video montages (read had to use lots of dissolves to stop the video editing software messing up the audio) of Colossus and Stealth from the 20th May. There’s also another video from that day, but you’ll have to e-mail me if you want that as it’s restricted availability (and cert 18 courtesy of Rich’s filthy mouth ![[:haha:]](images/smile/smile19.gif)
).
Also now online are some photos from the uni-esque - sorry, UniS - trip on 30th May.
No, not to me: to Legoland Windsor which celebrated its 10th birthday over the weekend. After popping into Chessington for the morning, as a proud annual pass holder I went along to the Legoland party on Saturday. Paul and Rich came too. Well, to be fair, it was Paul’s idea in the first place.
“New” for 2006 is a revised version of Lego London
Continue reading ‘Happy Birthday to a pile of old bricks’
Paultons Park is a small family park on the edge of the New Forest. Its not a park I’d heard much about until news started coming out last year that they intended to open a Gerstlauer Bobsled coaster for the 2006 season.
Gerstlauer Bobsleds I had heard about, especially how good the model at Tripsdrill was, so I was eager to try out one a little closer to home myself. An offer from Paul of a trip to the park on Saturday was just the ticket.
To put it mildly, the day started cold. I’d stopped briefly at Winchester services on the way down to check on the builders and walked out to find it starting to sleet/snow. Bloody global warming - the world gets hotter apart from England. Typical.
Paultons Park Anyway, with ticket in hand (or AP in Paul’s case) we went straight across to
Cobra which was having just about as understated an official opening as you can get.
Continue reading ‘P-P-P-Pick up a Paultons’
Thorpe Park is one of my local theme parks that, under the command of the Tussauds Group, has been transformed in the last five or so years.
It has come a long way from the water park opened in 1979 on the site of a former gravel pit (see a great history of the park here).
Every now and then, a few pictures pop up on the web of those early days. Its interesting to see the attractions that used to lay on the site of today’s coasters and other rides.
I hope I’ve gone one better than a few more pictures: I’ve just acquired some 8mm film footage of the park in the very early years of operation.
I don’t know much about the history of the film. I know that it was filmed by an amateur cameraman who was apparently a member of a Surrey film club between the 50s and 70s. The film turned up at a house clearance auction along with a lot of others a while ago, and was in turn sold to me.It was suggested that it was filmed in 1975, although this doesn’t sound very plausible since the park didn’t open until 1979. It has also been mentioned though that this may have been filmed while the park was still being constructed - some kind of preview event? On the off chance that anybody knows anything/can identify something in the film which can help date it, please let me know or post a comment.
I know a few people who will be interested to see it, so I’ve done my best to make it available online as quickly as possible. Thus, so far its only been transferred into a digital format via an old analogue camcorder. The quality isn’t too bad, but of course nothing like that of the film itself.Since film and video have different framerates, there’s some noticeable flicker unfortunately. The next step will be to get this properly (professionally) transferred, before the notorious Super 8 colour fade sets in.
Hopefully this will prove interesting - but
please respect my bandwidth by downloading (right click, Save Target As…) the file rather than streaming it from the web server. I know there are a few problems with the conversion into Real Video - I’m aware of these and might put a better version online when I get the proper transfer done.You can download the film from
my videos page.
Edit: The video is now available in both Real and Windows Media versions