We were the envy of our neighbours again, this time because of our Breakfast burger. Our neighbours had a fancy pants stove on a stand but assembly was their downfall again and our little portable thing was up and running and frying burgers in a jiffy when everyone else were still struggling over the instructions of theirs. Even passers-by paused, struck up a conversation, and pretended to know us in the hope that they would get some of our scram. Not a chance.

 

As it was such a busy field this year, it was predictable that the queues for the showers would be unendurable. Not only that, even the walk to the showers and back promised to be a long haul – I simply couldn’t be bothered this time around (and normally I’m a definite one-shower-a-day-minimum person). It was time to implement the backup plan aka The Babywipe Shower. Well, these things seem to manage to keep shitty pucky babies clean, thought I, so let’s see what they can do for stinking hippies. I gave everything a quick rub over and felt pretty refreshed afterwards. So far, so good.

 

By the time we’d consumed and digested our breakfast burgers, it was still too early for any music on the field so we ‘did’ the village again, concentrating on the car boot sales this time rather than the Brasenose Arms. Well…the car boot sale singular as we’d got ourselves confused about what day it was and thought the big Saturday car boot sale was today…which it wasn’t because today was actually Friday. Owing to said lack of expected car boot sale therefore, the village got ‘did’ pretty quickly leaving us no option but to go back to the tent and gather all our stuff. The march over to the main field was exhausting and dusty in the baking sun, and we were grateful when we pitched up next to the Aliens again.

 

One pitched, basically we sat, drank, and listened to music. We did our shopping in shifts – first I did one side of the field then came back to relax, then my friend did a side of the field and came back to relax and so on. Each time, one of us came back with a 4 pint carton of beer and all was good with the universe.

 

About halfway through the day one of the Morris dancer troupes we had seen at Warwick turned up (the ‘white shirts tucked in’ people who did the broom dance). They did the pipe dance that we’d seen them do in the street, only this time on stage and they were pretty slick – I guess in Morris dancers they are the equivalent of Oasis, the Rolling Stones or …or…(dredged the brain for someone reasonably trendy) er…Rianna? The Rianna of morris dancing - a funny old way to make a living, it has to be said.

 

Coming up to sunset was the highlight of the day – a recreation of the album “Liege & Lief “ by Fairport Convention using the original cast list of the band more or less – excepting one member owing to the fact they were dead. My friend was all wound up about it but I was a bit ‘so what’ so he went off to the front and left me reading in my chair with a beer in my hand. As the set wore on however, I really started to get wowed by it all and after it finished and my friend came back, I had to admit that I had been seriously impressed with what I had just listened to and intended to get a copy of the album at the earliest opportunity.

 

Everything following that set was a bit of a let down really. I continued reading using my headtorch while my companion mocked me (I couldn’t see what was wrong with reading in the pitch dark in the middle of a field…) then when the cold really started to bite I joined him in pacing around a bit. It was just starting to become unbearable by the time the last act finished and our breath was steaming in the chilly air on the long plod back to the tents. And we’d been told that this weekend was the perfect weekend to view shooting stars but it was too darn cold to linger outside to see them. Pity.

It was the final festival of the year and we were heading for Cropredy – just down the motorway from Warwick. Cropredy has been a regular in my season for many years now, and steeped with memories of the variety of unconnected events that have kept drawing me back again and again.

 

Unfortunately one notable aspect of said festival is the long, long queues to get in. Generally you are reduced to a near static crawl close to Cropredy village and you normally have to be armed with amusement (music), drinking water, and the necessary equipment to quickly leap out and pee in a bush as necessary (i.e. the Y chromosome).

 

That said, my companion’s car had broken down so I was driving. This meant no CD player in the car and therefore nothing to get us through the two hour wait that we had from the motorway turn-off to eventually parking up. I knew and dreaded this as soon as we left, but to be honest once we were in it, it wasn’t so bad…I’m not sure exactly how we avoided getting fractious and bad tempered but somehow we did. Also, by just one car we missed being diverted to ‘field seven’ (aka the back of beyond – dreaded by all Cropredy festival goers) instead of the field we eventually wound up in. A bit of a shallow victory though perhaps, as we were placed in the furthest corner of said field and faced with a long walk to every facility available to us.

 

Boy it was busy! I’d never seen Cropredy quite like it. You normally get steered to your pitch by festival stewards and given a generous amount of space. This year though they were bunching people up really closely so as soon as the engine was turned off, we were all scurrying to get our tents up to establish our pitch (winner takes all and losers have to put up with flaccid half-assembled tents shoved into available gaps with no guy ropes a la WOMAD rules). Thankfully we were parked next to a couple whose last time in Cropredy was about 10 years ago so they were out of practise. Consequently we kicked their asses in terms of tent assembly speed and they were still arguing about their vestibule when we were tapping in our final guy ropes. The woman of the couple commented on our slickness, and all we could do was shrug nonchalantly and wipe the sweat from our brows.

 

After a hard morning of queues and tent assembly, it is traditional to calm down and get in the mood by going down ‘the village’ for a couple of bevies at The Brasenose Arms. Its always been a particularly cynical and exploitative pub, charging different rates for locals (high prices) versus festival goers (ludicrous prices), but this time it had opened its backyard to a mini music festival of its own and a local band was pumping out Dylan and Hendrix with an enthusiasm that belied their actual talent. The bar queues were tolerable but you needed to plan 20 minutes ahead to pee (if you were a girl). Despite this, we found ourselves a rock to squat on in the sun and sup, breathing in the heady fumes of hog roast and spilt ale. When my companion was at the bar, the occasional old rocker would stumble up and slur a complement to me about my colour scheme (canary yellow trousers with royal blue top) and I would politely thank them in return. Whilst I was at the bar, my companion would go previous-festival-t-shirt spotting and see which was the oldest he could find. After a pint or two of this, we finally started getting in the mood.

 

Mojo thus recovered, we trawled over to our tent to get all the necessary stuff for an evenings pitch. Cropredy is a very static event. You tend to haul all your stuff over to the field in the morning and not return to your tent until midnight. This means you have to take everything with you for a baking summer’s day (sunscreen, shorts, sunhats, sunglasses etc), take contingent for if it rains suddenly (raincoat, wellys, brolly) something to keep you warm when the temperature plummets after sunset (big jumpers, warm socks, woolly hat, gloves etc) and then the rest (seat, table, ground sheet, night lights, silver tankard, etc etc). The only alternative tactic is to go on the field with absolutely none of this nonsense and get so drunk that you don’t care by the end of it that you’re squatting on the ground in the dark in other peoples discarded fast food dinners, and dew is forming on your skin because its near freezing and you are just wearing Hawaiian shorts and a tie died shirt. These are usually the same people you find sleeping in a hedge bottom the following morning with suspicious stains around the groin area of their trousers. I have never been one of them.

 

There is always a lot of kit envy at festivals too, but I think Cropredy is particularly bad because of its static nature and large amount of required on-field kit. Wheelbarrow and cart envy is also unique to Cropredy, I believe. People’s pitches can be embellished with tea lights, little fences, solar lights, flags, you name it. All these things need to be hauled from the camping fields to the main field and the most innovative transportation always obtains plaudits from the crowd. Flags are also a big feature, and actually a necessity because it’s pretty difficult to find your companions in a big crowd, even if they are all seated and not milling about. You either bring your own flag (as I have been meaning to for years) or feed off others. We, for instance, picked someone else’s flag and pitched near them then navigated by that.

 

The field was the most crowded I have ever seen…rumours were circulating that the festival was sold out (a first!) but it was only just starting to become clear it was true. There was a huge throng near the stage, even though it was just the first act, and everywhere that normally had queues now had BIG queues…you had to change your expectations radically to expect a 20 minute delay in anything you wanted to do.

 

We lounged at a safe distance – about as near as we could get to the stage without getting tramped and out of the ‘stand up zone’. We pitched near ‘the aliens’ – two inflatable aliens on a flag pole that we had seen year after year since coming to Cropredy. We supped the beer on offer this year - not the usual Somersault ale but something less hoppy - then left our chairs and edged as near as we could get to the stage for Jools Holland (which wasn’t very near at all). It was a bloody good session, predictably. Jools was looking a bit old IMHO (bald patch, paunch, legs a bit bandy) but who cares – his big band and choice of powerful singers, including Lulu, and he exercised his usual excellent taste in the run of this set. I really enjoyed the evening.

 

I returned to my tent with a spring in my step…until I realised I needed to go pee and there was a long queue. Endured this, then huddled desperately in my sleeping bag to try to regain some of the warmth I’d lost on the field. Didn’t work, so I added a blanket. Didn’t work, so rooted out all my large jumpers and layered them over me one by one like one of those expensive meals you can get where the meat is balanced on some potato and the veg is balanced on top of this in some precarious but artistically valid arrangement. Finally got to a place and a state where I was warm and reasonably comfortable…and then needed a pee again.

 

Decided to endure it and try to go to sleep…

Now I know I’ve done ‘folk’ festivals before, but today we journeyed over to the most folky folk festival we'd ever tackled to date. This was to be Warwick folk festival, a festival that has been on the go harumpty-coff years now and is one of the most respected in the land (or so the flyers for it told us).

 

The hard core beardy-wierdy element held no fear for me to be honest. No, the element that was giving me the most foreboding was the recent floods, especially those all over Gloucestershire and Warwickshire. I was driving and I had visions of endless tailbacks on motorways because lanes were under water, coasting through foot high puddles, and getting my mate to push the car out of banks of mud. And that was even before we got to our camp site and discovered it flooded, and then had to face three days of morris dancing standing up to our knees in mud in the driving rain. I really wasn’t getting that warm fluffy feeling about any of it, and it was my mate who largely managed to summon the sufficient optimism for both of us to make me to give it a go.

 

As it was, the Warwick is only a short painless drive from Manchester (including traditional coffee and voiding stop at Norton Caines service station). Our destination, we were assured, was ‘well drained’ and all the weather report sites told us Warwick was going to have a big fluffy cloud over it with a smile sun peeking from just behind.

 

When we got there however, a bit early, we got turned away from the camp site. The reason was a mysterious one (‘Oh the school won’t let us use the field yet’ – we were camping on the grounds of a large private school) and the guy at the gates told us to go park somewhere in town for a bit and come back in a couple of hours when we might be let on to camp finally.

 

I continued to interpret everything as an omen of disaster, hypothesising that the field was under water and they were trying to find other places for us to camp…that they wouldn’t let us park near the tents and we’d have to walk miles lugging all our stuff…that I’d have to leave the car for three days in a £1 per hour town car park and run up a vast bill etc etc etc. My mate told me to shut up and aim for the castle where theoretically we could hang out for a while to kill time. After an extremely circuitous route, a bit of queuing and a silly amount of walking from the overspill car park to the castle’s main gates we discovered the entrance fee was £18 to get in. At that point we gave up, and walked all the way back to the school again where the festival was to see if it was letting cars in yet. It was...and we didn't have the car with us…so we marched all the way back to the castle carpark to get the car and finally camped up several exhausting hours after we first arrived.

 

At least it wasn’t raining though.

 

Once we’d camped, we started to feel a bit more settled, as is usually the case. We’d pitched up next to a large cordoned off area which we were told by one fella was reserved for a large party and this was a bit worrying… for instance would it be a coach load of unruly children all running around at night screaming and tripping over things? Or a coach load of unruly pensioners, all doing the same? There was nothing we could do about this now though and time would tell.

 

Consulting our site map, the first evidence of flood adjustments became apparent. Where the map said there would be toilets there often wasn’t – perhaps because the intended area was a bit boggy. Certain bits of campsite labeled for tents were roped off and pools of glistening water were evident everywhere you looked. Our patch was ok though. The ground seemed firm underfoot, and we were within strolling distance of the school swimming pool/cricket pavilion via a concrete path that spanned the boggy areas like a bridge. Said buildings were going to be open to the folkies over the weekend which meant access to toilets and shower/changing room, and certain times even a ‘folk wash’ (i.e. a free go in the pool).

 

Once we had got our bearings, we had an amble round the school grounds to scope out the rest of what was available to us. We found a tiny food area (x1 chips and burger stall, x1 baked potato stall, x1 Caribbean stall) where we fortified ourselves with chilli covered baked spuds and a side order of wasp. We found the half finished main arena tent, and the patch of ground where the beer tent was likely to be. Then we found the couple of small arts theatres nearby where some of the artists would be playing later…and finally found the main road which we had already drove up and down two times and walked up and down four times, but seemed the only option left for a bit of entertainment.

 

Girding ourselves, we returned on foot to town intent on sampling the many bands that were meant to be playing in pubs dotted around the place. The first place we stopped at for a pint didn’t have anyone playing or any beer to my taste, but had a nice uncluttered beer garden under a very loud church tower that chimed every hour, and it gave us time to stare at the uncomprehensible events program and try to get some sort of sense out of it. After two pints of study, we located somewhere nearby that was a venue and popped our heads in there. It had empty seats and nice lager in appropriate glasses so we settled, and soon we were joined by a couple of guys called ‘Al Fresco’ playing at the front of the bar.

 

Here is a blurry photograph of one of them. The guy to the right with his head in his hands adequately expresses my own personal opinion of them.

 

 

Luckily the lager was going down nicely and someone had left a 'Warwickshire Life' on the table for me to read. Also, the performance was spiced up halfway through by some random guy who came out of nowhere and led an unaccompanied sing-a-long about drunk firemen, then disappeared off into the night again. He was great, I could have listened to more of him. Unfortunately we got 'Al Fresco' back on again instead.

 

Once the band had wrapped up, we decided to head back to the main festival site and see if we can see a few bands at some of the other venues. Via luck and Brownian motion, we found ourselves at The Bridge House Theatre, a small Arts venue near the school, and there we settled down to Keith Donnelly, someone we'd not heard of before but was clearly legendary in the folk circles as a complete nutcase (in a similar mould to Billy Connelly only Geordie and more whimsical with less swearing). At the beginning of his skit, he kept trying to play a song but then wandered off on lots of funny psuedo-philosphical tangents...he'd keep remembering himself and strumming the guitar again a couple of times, then he'd remember another good joke and off he'd go again on another nutty ramble. In the end it took him about 10-15 to finally get round to his first song, at which point he revealed he was actually a very good guitarist, but then he drifted into another excited monologue and we'd all be rolling in the aisles laughing at him once more. Happily, he was on again over the course of the weekend and compairing too, so we made it our business to see him again.

 

We could have tried to catch the last act at the main tent but we were both knackered and it was pretty crowded so we went back to our tents instead (via a plate of chips). Our neighbours had arrived, and seemed quiet and well behaved. I had erected the tent with every single peg and guy rope I possessed because it was a bit breezey and the frame was swaying alarmingly - all was still pinned firmly to the ground. And the couple who we'd left a while back battling half heartedly with a gazebo had moved elsewhere (or perhaps given up in desperation and gone home). All was quiet, all was well.

 

All disturbingly peaceful though...where was the raucous drunks and filth and litter and crowding...? This was a folk festival alright, but not as we know it. Very strange...very strange. Maybe we'd get more into the rhythm tomorrow. Until then....sleep.

 

(also see the Wychwood 2007 photo album)

 

Woke up at an unfeasible hour of the morning again with a small flock of spiders up my nose (spiders do flock, right?). Taking the plugs from my ears I lay for a while watching the tent flies move about my head and listening to the neighbours talking. There had been thefts in the night again. Someone had lost a handbag, another a wallet. My own stuff was secure however, but then again I had slept with it clutched to my breast like some sort of obsessive miser. The only way a thief is going to get MY £25.46 and nearly full Egg credit card was to molest me, and after the length of time I have been without a bloke, this may not be such a bad thing. I did feel sorry for everyone who had got ‘got’ though and hoped there would never come a time where your valuables *aren’t* safe even if they are tucked in your sleeping bag with you. At that point I guess, peace and love is truly dead.

 

Anyhoo, waking up at a stupid hour meant I was once more one of The Unwashed, standing blinking and yawning in the shower queue at early doors when they couldn’t get their plumbing to work, so the water was ‘bracing’ (read – cold). Showers run, incidentally, by a family of people we happened to be sitting next to yesterday and were notable because they were quite happy to let their (seemingly)12 yr old daughter sit there and smoke fags.

 

 

Been doing festivals for a while now and hitherto we’ve being using a lil 1 burner portable stove balanced precariously on an upturned plate. It’s a configuration that is fragile in the extreme and rendered immediately useless the first breath of wind or a carelessly placed boot. Finally though, this year, my mate gave up and upgraded to a ‘Hot Stove ™’, a fancy pants thing with its own stand and griddle and all sorts of bells and whistles. He really got to road test it today (men like cooking so I left him to it, I guess it panders to primitive cavemen instincts to do with manipulating fire and providing for the tribe – at least that’s the way I sell it to him as he slaves over the food and I sit applying suntan lotion to myself and offering the occasional word of encouragement). The old Hot Stove ™ turned out to be a Bonza deal too – burgers are crispy on the outside and soft in the middle, bacon doesn’t do that whole ‘broiled in its own salty juices’ thing it tends to do in frying pans, and kettles boil in no time. Hot Stove ™ gets the Hungry Hippie thumbs up seal of approval.

 

Thus sated, we ambled over to the Big Red Tent That Smells of Horses for the first act, which was a lovely delicate plinky affair that was scheduled extremely badly – having to compete to folk’s equivalent of Marilyn Manson on the main stage screaming and doing bizarre dog noises and completely drowning them out. They put up a valiant effort and personally I still thought they were good, though you could tell that the bloke of the twosome was deeply pissed off and he stalked off the stage at the end fuming with resentment.

 

After this, the whole main stage line up went completely tits up with all the listed artists moved, bumped, shifted around and all sorts. Not that we wanted to see most of them, we wanted to see all the acts going on in the Big Red Tent That Smells of Horses, but it was so hot and smelly in there that we had to keep coming out for air. It started to make me grumpy and I began to politely ask people to get their butts the hell out of my way when they stood directly in front of my chair without checking to see if they were blocking my view, at which point I recognised I had to get outa there quickly and dull my fury with frozen margaritas. Eventually we split up for a bit, him doggedly sticking it out in the Red Tent but me hiding in the lighter, more airy Other Tent with a beer in my hand - keeping a keen eye out for Donald and trying not to get involved in games of ‘Dance like a Fairy Princess’ with nearby children.

 

 

Children eh? I was thinking this yesterday – I never got took to festivals as a kid. I was brought up on the Isle of Man after all, where they don’t just not have festivals, but they even throw rocks at Outsiders that try to make such devil music. I think I would have liked it a lot though. And when you think about it, look at all the expense and effort that has gone into Seaworld in Florida and yet all the kids you see there are dragging around the place looking bored and unimpressed. Then look around a folk festival and all the kids there with their faces painted, twirling poi and getting more delight from playing hide and seek in between the recycling bins than they ever would traipsing round Disney gazing at all the plastic displays. Music festivals are a brilliant weekend holiday for kids – plenty to do, instils them with an innate appreciation of music AND teaches them tolerance of their fellow man (because of all the patchouli smelling, tutu wearing nutters wandering around – SAFE nutters though, the same sort of nutters that eat tofu and cry when they stand on a buttercup and would never in a million years kidnap and molest a child). I watched a bunch today weaving in and out of the bins – a couple of kids from various neighbouring families temporarily hitched up to improvise some sort of Batman based improv session with a bubble making sword (you had to be there really). Anyway the bins were the Batcave I think, and some of the littler kids screamed when they were pulled from behind them, they loved them so much. Just like when you buy a kid an expensive present and they start playing with the box it came in I guess…

 

…Anyway, the day went in a lightening blur. I don’t know whether that was the sun, the music, or the healthy amount of beer and margaritas I consumed. Either way before I knew it, it was the final act and we hung out at the back leaping up and down chiefly just to try and stay warm.

 

And then it was all over for another year. Faces pink, feet dirty and hair in greasy clumps from being compressed into unnatural positions by our sun hats, we sat outside our tents for a good tent minutes before we realised that the Hot Stove ™ had run out of gas and we’d have to walk all the way back to the café for our cup of tea. Lesson of the festival:– the new stove is brilliant at cooking burgers but a greedy little beggar and gets through a can of gas per each two days – something to note before the festival season really kicks off. And tradition dictates that He Who Does Not Own the Stove (I owned the last one) Buys the Gas…perhaps I got landed with the bum deal with this one.

 

It was a blood red moon. Red moon at night, hippy delight – a nice note to end on. Next scheduled festival is Warwick but we’re already looking around for others to plug the gaps. I’ve missed my calling…bolloxs to IT, I should I have stayed with that Phone Line Tarot Card Reading job I had years ago and learnt how to cleanse peoples auras. I can see it now ‘Gypsy Elly – fortune told and auras cleansed. No job too big, all offers considered’. Oh well...

 

(also see the Wychwood 2007 photo album)

Waking up in tents is one of those sweet and sour things I was mentioning earlier. First you lie there for a while listening to the gentle rattle of canvas, the burble of voices and the jangle of tent zippers. Then you open your eyes and gaze up at the canopy lit up by sun, and spangled by droplets of dew and a thousand tiny little spider webs. Then you realise you need a pee. This means you have to pull on all your clothes, walk half a mile through mud, and squat over some miniature recreation of The Somme battleground whilst blearily clutching a small handful of toilet roll. I generally turn over and try to hang on as long as possible, especially as getting in and out of my bed is a complicated 93 step procedure involving liners and outer bags and mattresses and blankets and mosquito nets and inflatable pillows and...god well lets just say one don't get in and out of my sleeping bag configuration lightly. I've oft considered peeing into a bottle instead, and frequently curse the fact I lack the biological peeing equipment that men have (but only for these ocassions, I hastily add).

Getting decent sleep whilst camping is also a bit of a lottery for me. Sometimes you get lucky and get just the right combination of temperature, light, humidity, phase of the moon, air pressure, ley lines, sun spots etc to miraculously get a wonderful restful night. Sometimes though, it all goes wrong and you wake up at 5am feeling like crap.

Unfortunately I got the bad deal that morning. To make good, I stumbled over to the showers and got an early doors wash, avoiding all the queues that build an hour or two later. When I returned, I surprised my mate by being up before him (it's usually the other way around by a couple of hours). I also surprised him by being in a ferociously bad temper because I was so tired. I apologised and pretended it was down to girlie hormones - what other atrocities have been blamed on such an innocent cause I wonder?

The rest of the day was marked by my bad night. Whereever possible, I pitched, slumped and dozed. I even pitched, slumped and dozed for quite loud, jumping up and down type bands - even when I was right next to the speakers. Some people still managed to grab my attention though. Brett Dennon made me get up and stand at the front to watch, and Shooglenifty got my toes tapping (plus the fiddle guy's beard was mesmeric, it kinda pulled my head from side to side as he moved around the stage, I couldn't take my eyes from it). One String Loose appeared to be a band of 15 yr olds managed by their Mums but their virtuosity was admirable even for adults, and had me rushing to the front for a home-brew cd. They hung around later to watch Ruarri Joseph, notable because he quite charmingly established a little rapour with a threesome of drunken lasses at the front who were wearing flashing bunny ears.

He invited them on stage to dance for a number and they all did get up though two quickly wimped and left 'Bunny girl #2' there on her own. She faltered for a moment but then decided to go for it, and started leaping around dancing, banging drums, playing keyboard and strumming bass - she was absolutely fantastic and got a huge applause at the end of it.

As she returned to her mates she asked Ruarri 'Are yer married yet?' (he politely replied that he was) and they all got free t-shirts. That was a very nice show.

Interestingly, another familar face turned up in that very same concert - 'Donald'. Donald freaked the hell out of us last year at Wychwood by suddenly coming out of nowhere and plonking his chair down next to us while we were cooking our breakfast at our tents. He introduced himself, and pointed at the back of his chair (where the word 'Donald' was painted with a sun motif). He then went on to explain he was a temporary postman, thinking about being a steward at the festival next year. He creepily told us how a postman can learn everything about someone (something you know but never want confirmed), and how he liked wandering around festivals simply introducing himself to people and talking about new things.

In truth, our initial reaction was that he must be a thief scoping our tents for valuables, sadly. A short while after that, we decided he was just a nutter, though potentially quite a dull clingy one that must be escaped from quickly. Also, despite his claims that he liked to talk to people - it was difficult to get a word in edgeways and mostly he talked about himself. I started to pretend that we had a burning desire to see the next act back at the main stage and we quickly packed up and made our excuses. As we sprinted of towards the field, we saw him pitch his chair next to another bunch of suprised and suspicious looking campers and start rolling out the same speil. From then on, we realised that we had to avoid this man at all costs.

Now here we were, a year on, and Donald had turned up again like a bad penny. What really made me smile though was that he'd clearly he'd already 'done' the Bunny girls because just as me and my mate were giving each other a horrified look and preparing to flee should he catch our eye, the bunny girls also all started exchanging similar glances amongst one another. Donald pitched his chair right next to them (still with 'Donald' written on the back) and wandered off to the bar, at which point Bunny #1 quickly grabbed his chair and shoved it far away from them as possible. Then, even funnier, another guy quickly leapt up and shoved the chair away from him too - it wound up being right up at the front against a post facing the crowd and when poor old (now alcoholically buffuddled) Donald came back with his pint, he didn't initially spot it and made a woozy grab for mine (he was politely but firmly corrected). And I swear when he sat down, everyone subtely started to shuffle and lean away from him. Poor Donald. I saw him later sitting on his own near the bins eating a curry. Living proof the humankind doesn't really want to love one another, even hippies.

I flagged very early because of my poor night's sleep, and warned my companion of this. Luckily he was knackered too so we both sloped off before the start of the final act and we brewed fruit tea at our tents listening to Badly Drawn Boy drifting over campsite at dusk, it was very calming. I promised that an early night would mean I would be much more Full of Fun the next day. The subtext of this was - I had no intention of getting up early on Monday to get showered or rush off home so I intended to drink heavily all of Sunday. I do believe my mate missed the hidden message. Oh well...it's not like it's going be be anything like The Tequila Incident again is it...?

(also see the Wychwood 2007 photo album)

Yay it's festivalling season again, how I love it. Festivalling is a funny sweet and sour mix. On the downside, you got crowds, you got queues, you got filth and discomfort and burgers that cost £18.50 (with tomato sauce and a can of coke being £12 extra). On the up side, you got great music, a chilled out atmosphere, you got sun (hopefully) and you got wonderful people-watching opportunities as far as the eye can see.

I also like the fact you get musical surprises - you accidentally wander past a tent and hear a few bars drift past you that you like and bingo, suddenly you're a fan of someone completely obscure, can't get their songs anywhere and curse the fact for months afterwards. I like the fact you see certain characters again and again, like the old hairy guy with the chaotic hair, big beard and ludicrously tight hot pants (who is camped near utility point C this year - I saw him outside his tent reading a good food guide with his breakfast cooking on an upturned paint tin). I like the fact festivals let people dress like dicks so everyone can properly express themselves (guys in tutus and fairy wings, women with blue hair and pink flip flops, fat men topless with peace symbols painted across their bellies etc etc - a fashion police no-go zone). This is why I keep coming back again and again.

The formula for the first day of a festival is usually angst, queuing and sweat. First you have to fill the car and drive there, then queue to get tickets and be processed, and then more often than not lug your camp gear miles away from the car and pitch in blazing sun or pouring rain, by which time you are usually drenched (either with sweat or water) and filthy - and this is on day one of a weekend where you won't get to have a bath. As soon as the tent is up though and all the patchouli and passively ingested wacky backy smoke has started to build up in your system, you can relax and chill, safe in the knowledge that the worst bit is done (apart from having to take a bowel movement in one of the port-a-cabins at the end of the last night). You can don your fairy wings, stripy stockings, pixie hat and tie dye and start to have fun.

Me and my mate followed more or less that formula though we arrived just about when the campsite had opened so after all the swearing and tripping over of tent pegs, we still had plenty of time to chill and sit quietly bleeding (from tent assembly wounds) before the first act.

Now for some bitter truth - I like folk music and I go to festivals of folk. There - I've said it now. My Ma was a Greenpeace coordinator, I direct debit donate to a bunch of greenie activist human rights hippie tree huggy style charities and I buy my Lectric from companies that farm wind. Feeling comfortable around beards and fiddles just goes with the territory really, and I apologise to no-one for this.

Wychwood is a folk-esque concert. Yeah its sponsored by the old favourites - Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace etc, but it has a great eclectic mix of music. They stir in some old rockers, some dub, some world, some classical, anything goes really and that's what makes this one nice. On the friday night, for instance, we saw Adjagas, a group of laplanders and Sami who sung pop/folk songs in their native tongues (to be honest, it sounded like they were yodelling the same word over and over and over for 30 mins but it still sounded good. The lead singer woman was tiny too, childlike, a positive munchkin). Later we would have the opportunity to watch a 6'5" chap playing a front-slung african guitar thing that looked like a giant scrotum, a 60's rocker singing anti-Vietnam songs, and a Manc clubber 'largin' in man, lovin' it yeah'. Like I said - anything goes.

Another feature of festivals is all the crap you can eat and drink. The food stalls seem to get more and more exotic each year and this time around they had Goan, Indonesian, Caribean, Mexican, Serbo Croatian, Azerbaijanian (what happened to good old Fish and Chips eh?). They also had a frozen margurita stall this year too (mhuh hah hah) - my mate tried to restrain me, reminding me of 'The Tequila Incident' (details of which are best forgotten though ambulances were nearly called). The prices keep climbing but you're trapped and you are sitting with food and beer smells wafting over you all day, what can you do except go with the flow. That was my excuse anyway.

We returned to our tents about midnight. Wychwood has a pretty strict noise curfew of 11pm though bars are open til 3am (as indicated by all the comatosed people lying snoring in bushes still with tinnies in their hands). We packed in pretty swiftly after the main stage packed up though, good little folkies that we are. Sometimes hanging around back at the tent listening to the amateurs strumming 'Kum by ah my lord (sp?)' and 'House of the rising sun' can be just as evocative as the main acts. Fell asleep clutching my valuables to my chest in the my sleeping bag - thar be theiving varmits in this neck of the woods.

I woke up nice and early and spent an hour or so getting ready and trying to close my suitcase via a variety of cunning compression techniques – eventually choosing to jettison some grooming products and most of the freebie stuff given to me at the show in order to make sure I got all the musical tooth brushes and lump of Spanish moss back to the UK intact.

 

Then I decided to take a gamble. I couldn’t get through to Seaworld by phone in order to find out if they had anywhere to store luggage, so I decided to risk it and turn up on spec. I prepared myself to be able to reel out some sort of sob story (optionally – tearfully/cutely/flirtatiously depending on who I was dealing with) and steeled myself for maybe having to wander around Seaworld with a Barbie pink suitcase and laptop if my gambit went wrong. Either way, it made more sense than leaving everything at the hotel and having to take a taxi there and back and then to the airport again (as Seaworld was on the way to the airport from the hotel). It also maximised time at the place instead of faffing around unnecessarily on the interstate.

 

The gamble paid off. I hopped into a taxi right outside the hotel, and found some cheap ass lockers right outside the entrance to Seaworld where I was able to shove all my crap and walk around unfettered.

 

Seaworld...well I had already worked out that Orlando/Disney was another form of Vegas – just as plastic and cheesy but more family orientated. I’d also worked out that Orlando was mainly just a city with a large conglomeration of theme parks dotted around interspersed with ordinary suburban districts and you got your entertainment as a visitor by flitting from one theme park to another, checking yourself in, and then existing within the theme world’s confined environment for the day before taxiing/bussing it back to your hotel, putting the kids to bed, and getting drunk in the hotel bar.

 

Given all of this, I had reasonably low expectations for Seaworld. I knew that it too, would be pretty cheesy and fake and sealed and confined but my chief draw (apart from the fact that the Kennedy Space Centre was just to far away to be worth trying for in the time I had) was that Seaworld seemed to have the most impressive array of performing fish in the world, and I had never in my life seen a killer whale up close, let alone doing tricks.

 

Right from the outset I was accosted brutally by burger bars and souvenir shops. I struck off purposely down one of the cheerfully signposted walkways, trying to ignore the smell of cooking meat and popcorn and avert my eyes from the sparkling array of keychains and snowglobes and plush killer whales. I immediately headed for one of the stadiums where one of the first performances of the day was going to happen. It wasn’t advertised as a performance though, it was advertised as an ‘experience’ and I guess I should have took that as a warning signal looking back on it.

 

The stadium was got out like your average water park with violent blue sea themed podiums and stages all over the place.

 

 

A voice, the same voice that does movie trailers and says things like, “Dirk…he was a man alone, a man with a secret, and then he got called for a deadly purpose” all that sort of crap. This time it boomed out over the tannoy “...as a little child, did you ever dream of dancing with the dolphins...?” and then some woman came out in a pink leotard/dress and started miming how much she loved the ocean and wanted to swim off into the sunset to the sound of Disney music. A gate opened stage left, and a dolphin swum through. Leotard girl mimed pretending to accidentally sight said dolphin on the horizon and leapt into the water, and they pretended to gambol together in the water (dolphin drags her about a bit by his nose, they lay on their backs in the water together, that sort of thing).

 

Then a whole bunch of other leotard people show up, but they are in green leotards and I think we were meant to ignore them as they were largely there to feed the dolphins titbit rewards after they had done a trick and tell them what to do. They started encouraging the dolphins to leap around a bit and there were some pretty impressing jumps e.g.

 

 

It all hit some sort of crescendo as a bunch of dolphins did multiple backflips, and then they all swam off and the ‘invisible’ leotard people disappeared and the pink lady started gesticulating something which I didn’t quite get the meaning of. Mr Tannoy voice didn’t help with explaining the plot, unfortunately.

 

Suddenly the music changed from a gentle oceanic (Hammond organ style) ripple to a more birdlike chirpy theme. Then this woman in a chicken suit turns up (caught blurrily on camera phone here dangling in the middle)

 

 

Oh I’m sure it wasn’t meant to look like a chicken suit but it was red and feathery and looks a lot more like a chicken than the red tropical parrot that I later guessed she was trying to look like. She got up on a trapeze over the water and started swinging about, for no reason that was particularly clear. Now I had tried, up to now, to contain my contemptuous disbelief of what was going on for the sake of all the large moist Americans around me with moonfaced little kids who actually appeared to be enjoying this nonsense. The chicken lady really did make my jaw drop though, and try as I might, I couldn’t stop myself sniggering. Better still, after she had swung up and down for a while for no reason, two blokes came on in black chicken suits with little yellow frills on their heads and attached themselves to bungees. They started bouncing up and down and bobbing their heads in the water and this really cracked me up. In the end I only realised what the f*ck they were actually trying to do when they released some birds into the stadium, and some very lovely red tropical parrots and large condors did a few circuits of the stage choreographed to music. The guys must have meant to be condors. Said chicken suited guys can be seen waiting in the wings at the top of this blurry cameraphone shot

 

 

Once the chicken people had done their skit, the pink leotard woman came back. Then some bloke joined in. He was in a grey swimsuit though and (actually rather impressively) he popped out of the water standing on the back of two dolphins.

 

 

 

Mr Movie voice on the tannoy still didn’t explain what was going on but I had to presume he was leotard woman’s dream lover, some sort of merman who lived with the fishies. They all gambolled together in the water for a while, then there was another finale where the dolphins did another bunch of back flips across the pool.

 

  

 

Finally, they turned the sprinklers on and waved some flags around, and that’s when we knew it was all over.

 

 

Sorry, do I appear unmoved...? I filed out with the others and headed off on a ruthlessly logical circular path around the park, optimised to take in as many things as possible in the shortest time. First up was the manatee pool.

 

 

These are crazy things – nearest evolutionary relative, the elephant. From above, they looked like someone had dumped a whole bunch of duvets in the water and left them there.

 

 

From below, it looked like some sort of weird alien visitation.

 

Next up, the pearl diving tank. Actually it was two tanks with oysters scattered around on the bottom. In one tank was a hunky blonde bloke swimming up and down and showing off to the kids and hormonally agitated mothers, in the other tank was a well moulded woman swimming up and down showing off to the kids and the testosterone fuelled fathers – fun for all the family. Occasionally, one or another of the ‘divers’ picked up an oyster and it was opened up for a paying customer to see if it had a pearl in it.

 

Next up – one of those tunnel tanks you can walk through and look up at the fish.

 

 

Including my favourite of fish, the puffer fish

 

 

Then I hot footed it to the Shamu stadium for the killer whale ‘experience’.

 

It was going to be another family orientated show, you could tell that by all the buggies parked outside

 

 

Sure enough, after I had got settled a voice boomed out on the tannoy “...as a young boy, I had always dreamed of swimming with the Shamu...” and I slumped. Here we go again. This time there were four large screens behind the stage which showed a short dramatisation of a young boy who carved his own whale tail pendant in the hope that it would attract whales to him, and then one day he’s out in the boat and sure enough this damn great killer whale leaps out of the water in front of him and then tannoy guy bimbles on about “...and so that’s why its always good to hold on to your dreams, whatever they are, hold on to them tight...” etc etc. They showed pictures of the boy in the dramatisation next to a picture of a guy in a wetsuit, and then said guy in the wetsuit comes on stage and I guess that meant we all had to infer that he was the boy with the dream who had a tail shaped pendant and then a whale leapt up in front of him. Okay…right…whatever, just get on with it.

 

The stuff with the fish was actually quite impressive. It was one thing to see dolphins leaping around, but killer whales are *big* and when they move around they move fast and make a splash, I would not like to be deemed dinner by one of these things.

 

The guy stood on the fish’s nose for a bit

 

 

Then they hopped on stage and showed how big they were

 

 

Then another woman showed up and rode on one for a while

 

   

 

Then it went around the stage flicking its tail and splashing everyone with water.

 

 

It also leapt around for a bit but for the life of me I couldn’t capture that on a photo. Finally it poked itself up out of the water with a guy on top

 

 

Oh and... the guy also picked a girl out of the audience whose birthday it was today and wanted to be a vet. He let her come up on stage and pet a whale – she was clearly kaking herself. Afterwards, he gave her his whale tail pendant and told her to hold on to her dreams, and everyone got all tearful and clapped. I was wondering how many of those whale tail pendants he actually had, and if it really was the pendant that had meant so much to him as a boy, how come he appeared to have one per performance to give away, three times daily, twice at weekends.

 

There wasn’t much time before the next performance so I went straight over to the next and final show of the day. This was a sealion show and it was a very VERY naff panto style affair. The only saving grace was it was just as a rain shower started and everyone watching was protected from an intense 3 minute downpour.

 

 

 

Looking at my watch, my time was up. I had to hotfoot it back to my locker, grab a taxi and get on a plane. Getting to the airport and checking in went without a hitch, only to suffer a 1 hour delay on board as someone was declared medically unfit to fly and had to have their luggage removed from the hold again. This didn't put me in the best mood for spending the next 8 hours folded painfully into an airline seat trying to drink as much as I could of the complimentary wine. I couldn’t sleep either, even though this was an overnight flight, because my seat was right next to the toilets and all the people thumping past to get to them kept waking me up. And it was too hot. And I lost the elbows war with my companion again. Mutter grumble moan.

 

Finally got back home around 10am and basically just dumped my luggage in the middle of the floor and went straight to bed. When I woke again 4 hours later I felt reasonably ok, I even managed to summon the energy to go to a garden centre and tidy up a bit, but basically the day fizzled away in a fug of jetlag and disorientation.

 

Never mind. At least I now know I have to hold onto my dreams, that's the important thing (tries to look earnest and think of the killer whales).

Haven’t got a great deal to say about today because I was locked in a conference room all day in our hotel with some business partners. It was a long and intensive day and we stumbled out at about 6pm. The sales people had places to go (...and people to see) but we agreed to hook up with the dev team later. First though...Walmart. My boss still had to get that Pokemon game or his life would not be worth living when we got back. Hence, we brought up a list of all the Walmart’s on the car GPS and struck out for the nearest one.

 

This took us to the Kissimmee district of Orlando – I believe I mentioned it already. It’s sort of the arse-end of Orlando. There is a big strip on which there are loads and loads of cheap motels and we played a competition trying to spot the cheapest bed for the night around. In the end, there was one very stark place, basically the whole building was just one rectangular white pebble-dashed box with narrow cut windows in it and bare lightbulbs, and that was $23 a night. No pool, no view, no nuthin’ really and you could probably also rent the rooms by the hour. There weren’t a lot of cars parked in the lot...

 

Oddly, dotting in amongst all the motels on the way to Kissimmee were lots of castles. I know that sounds strange, but every mile or so there was a large castle, sometimes a purple one, sometimes a grey one. They varied in size as well as colour. They looked pretty real (in so much as, in places like these you always have to do a double take to check if something out of the ordinary is actually plastic or just a big bill board). They didn’t heavily advertise what they were either, unlike Gatorworld for instance with its 20ft plastic Gater head outside or Funland, World of Fun, Fun Universe, Planet of Fun, Funscape, and all the other lesser theme parks that had lost the battle to gain a place in downtown Disney. They weren’t hotels either, like they might have been in Vegas, because there weren’t any windows to speak of and a hotel would always have windows. There was even one for sale.

 

The next day when I went to Seaworld, I noticed that it too didn’t really advertise itself considering it was one of the largest theme parks of its type, so I guess these random castles must have been theme parks of some description or other after all, or maybe we were accidentally just driving along the back of them and the signs and advertisements were on another road on the opposite side. Either way...if you ever wanted to live in a cheap plastic castle, there’s one going spare on the highway to Kissimmee in Orlando, go take a look at it and see what you think. I think some nice cream curtains and some decking would do wonders for it.

 

 

The Walmart in Kissimmee was very like the Walmart in Downtown Disney. Same type of people wandering around, same cars in the lot, same tanned faces on the tills. Boss managed to get his games at last and I resisted buying any significant volume of crap, owing to my already having attempted closing my suitcase with all the musical toothbrushes and posable palm trees in it - things were getting a bit tight.

 

We met up again with our business partner people at the hotel and drove to a nice little Italian place with probably the most hostile waitress we’d ever encountered. She was oldish, grey haired and dumpy. Orders were taking with a charming breezy East coast accented “Whaddayawant?”. Food was flung at you, so everyone learnt pretty quickly that you sat well back when the dishes were being distributed. When you were asked if you wanted cheese sprinkled on your dish, you said yes else suffered a glare. If you dared to order more drinks as she was clearing away the plates she just snarled at you, ignored you and walked away (though to be fair, the drinks did arrive a little while later). In the end, she did mention that it had been “...a helluva day” and I did see a very large coach load of Japanese pull out of the lot towards the end of our meal. We still tipped her therefore, though basically just because we were too scared not to.

 

We finished off in the games room in the hotel. I was induced to partake in doubles billiards, but only because it was evenly matched – two people who could play (incl. my boss) and two people who could not (incl. me). A combination of a few fluke hits from me plus a whole bunch of very competent runs from boss meant we won and I didn’t shame myself which was satisfactory – and at least no-one forced me to play darts. We bid our farewells after that, and I went up to my room to plot what I was going to do with my last day.

 

Boss was leaving early in the morning (because he had to get back to Ireland), but as there was only one non-stop flight from Orlando to Manchester per day, my flight left at 6pm. This mean, if I used my time prudently, I could get one Orlando visitor attraction in before I had to go home. Hence I sat for an hour drinking coffee and searching on the internet through all the attractions that were reasonably near (couldn’t waste time travelling to, say, the Kennedy Space Centre for instance) and worth the effort (Epcot looked really really dull for instance, even though it was on my doorstep). It finally boiled down to Ripley’s Odditorium or Seaworld, and finally I opted for Seaworld because at least people have heard of that. Then I just had to work out what to do with my luggage in the mean time. I went to bed mulling over a plan...

 

The Wireless Enterprise Trade Show…If a bomb had gone off in that building it would have wiped out 30% of the geeks on the planet, I swear. There were geeks hogging the free Internet stations, there were geeks at the buffet bar complaining about their peanut allergies and diary intolerances, there were geeks wandering around with their shirts rucked up by their rucksacks (maybe that’s why they are called that?) - pushing their floppy hair out of their eyes and their glasses up their noses looking for the next room to go to to learn about the next set of exciting new developments in wireless enterprise solutions. There were geeks surfing on their laptops in every alcove, crevice and hole, it was a sea of geeks! A swarm! A hive! All coming out of lectures in droves to devour all the Pepsi max and power bars then fly off again to the next talk about DoD security implementations in BlackBerry back end servers <shudder>.

 

I tried to blend in but I had pitched it all wrong, I hadn’t packed the obligatory tan slacks and V-neck sweater appeared to be in vogue. At least I had jettisoned the suit though, that would have really made me stick out and put me in a dangerous situation. Pummelled limp-wristedly by a swarm of geeks, what a horrible way to go.

 

Anyhow…the show laid on buffet meals throughout, so being cheap skates we skipped breakfast at the hotel and instead had a ham and egg roll at some ‘key note lecture’ thing about back end servers and eagerly rooted through our freebie bag which contained lots and lots of advertisement leaflets from various show sponsors, plus a novel about business management, CDs of free trials of things, and rather randomly…a pedometer with a little compass in it. We spent the morning moving from lecture to lecture and/or schmoozing, had a buffet lunch, did a bit more lecture attendance and schoozing, then watched the main event of the day which was some crazy haired bloke précising his book ‘Blink’ (it was a very good lecture actually).

 

Oh…and we spent a quality hour hogging the Nokia stand trying to work out how the competition uses our features (we work for a rival firm). It was quite fun having all the geeks come up, assuming we were demonstrating on the stand, only for us to walk them through apps grumbling “yeah but…that’s all very well but the XXXX has this feature and we do it much better, yeah and as for that, that’s just flashy, you should try thing (gets our own phones out and shows the geek that)”. Eventually we got shooed away from the stand by the Nokia people as nuisances and sneaked out of the show to go shopping at the mall instead.

 

We had 40 minutes. We split up, and when we returned my boss had bought some trainers, the marketteting woman had bought some bottled water and a book, and I had bought x4 musical tooth brushes that played ‘We will rock you’ while you brushed your teeth plus some fluffy posable palm trees. My companions didn’t ask me to explain, they were used to me by now….

 

Of course our shopping did have a serious purpose. My boss was actually after a particular game for his kids which was apparently just out, and he wanted to take advantage of American prices. When I asked what, it turned out to be Pokemon Diamond and Pearl and that’s when I clapped my hands ecstatically and told him I had spent around 4-6months of my life obsessed with Pokemon (on the Gameboy). “Yeah but its just this flat thing that moves around this flat map thing, then it meets another flat thing and there is a picture of them fighting - I don’t get it personally”. “No no no!” I raved back, “…the games got depth, it’s got subtly…and when I’d finished my first game – suddenly I could communicate with children”. It’s true too, its pretty strange comparing your Pokemon collection with someone when you are 32 and they are 7 but it bridges ages barriers like nothing else. The marketing strategy is very cunning too, preying on kids need to collect and possess, as well as being almost infinitely scaleable because it is electronic – “Gotta get ‘em all”...scarily clever really. Luckily I’d managed to curb my addiction after the first Pokemon session, but I still get little pangs here and there. Pokemon monsters have moved on though of course, so my Dr Doolittle like abilities to talk to the children has since evaporated.

 

Anyhoo, basically the Mall was too posh to sell games so we went to the nearest Walmart instead. I was a Walmart virgin – it was quite fascinating to see the demographic of the customers change so radically though. Everyone in the Mall was clean and affluent and either white American or tourist. In Walmart, it was a 50:50 split between redneck and Hispanic and the Hispanic community even had their own section with obscure brands of refried beans and chilli and labels in Spanish. All the cars in the lot were rusted and had dogs and overweight children dangling out of them. There wasn’t a white face serving on any check-out.

 

I was sorely tempted with a packet of Twinkies and some granola bars but realised I’d never get them back (what with my suitcase now being full of musical toothbrushes). Boss also failed to find his games too, which meant we’d have to do a tour of all the other Walmart’s around the place tomorrow when we had time. The mission, as a whole, was a failure.

 

We drove back to the hotel, then settled at the bar to prepare our slides for the meeting we had the next day. The people we were meeting apparently saw us later on when the were checking in but decided not to say hello because ‘we were looking very intense’ …aka we were very hot and bothered and irritable after about 3 hours arguing over the content of our slides with one another and battling with our VPN connections. We finally packed up and got something to eat around 9pm. Then, just as we were walking over to the nearby food court again as yesterday, the heavens opened and drenched us roundly in a 30 second tropical rainstorm. We sat in TGI Fridays, dolefully dripping and cursing the ubiquitous air conditioning that always makes coming indoors a chore because its so hot outside and yet always hypothermic inside unless you remember to bring a coat. Consequently, just because we were so grumpy and damp, everything else was wrong with the world too, it was too cold, it was too damp, the beer was flat, the steaks were too salty, boss even raised it with the manager. AND, on the way back, even though it didn’t rain, we were ‘got’ by a dozen sprinklers which were laid out, as if as a trap, so there was no possible way to walk along the street without getting splatted by at least one of them. We know, we stood looking at them for a while watching the pattern and timing of how they turned to see if there was a way through the maze – there wasn’t. It meant we got back to the hotel drenched yet again, and wordlessly said our goodnights to one another.

 

I fell blissfully to sleep. So far, no jet lag.

Ok so…I managed to blag my way into Premium Economy, and what a rare treat that was too. Not that I would ever pay my own good money for such a privilege, I can say that being ushered onto the plane first before all the plebs is mighty fine, as is complementary drinks through the flight, and discovering that your luggage is first up on the baggage claim belt at the end of it all.

 

As to the rest of the associated perks? More debatable. I didn’t feel I particularly reaped the benefits of the 2 extra cms of recline and if the seats were wider, that still didn’t stop my companion nicking all of the arm rest. Indeed, I think they should come up with a new class of seat especially for gutless antisocial gits who can’t establish their own territorial claim on arm rests. One which provide chairs with their own separate arm rests and not a shared one, preferably all screened off from one another too so you don’t have to spend 7+ hours studiously avoiding speaking to the person next to you by faining being engrossed in the film/being engrossed in your dinner/engrossed in a book/deaf/stupid/dead etc. I wouldn’t pay for Premium Economy at present but I sure as hell would pay top dollar for Gutless Antisocial class – especially if the air hostesses didn’t talk to you as well.

 

Also, being sat in the hump was interesting but again...apart from the passing thought when we took off of ‘We’ve took off! Oh, no we haven’t, we’re just really really high off the ground but still taxing” its nowt special alas. And there weren’t any film stars around either. Am I just a cynical old git?

 

The flight was what you come to expect of long haul flights. It was long, it was a haul. Watching films managed to stave off screaming hysterical boredom (‘The Illusionist’ – v.clever, ‘Music and Lyrics’ – what you’d expect from any film with Hugh Grant in it really, ‘That latest Bond movie’ – very slick, though the product placement in the movie was quite shameless) and the complimentary drinks dulled the cramps of trying to sleep in an uncomfortable seat (with or without 2 cms extra of recline). My companion was Irish and kept trying to talk to me despite best efforts to avoid him. When he did finally manage to draw a few gruff sentences from me though, he said he thought I was Welsh. It was about that point that I started ordering my itsy bitsy wines in twos and threes.

 

That said, in terms of drink it was actually my companion who was really going for it, not even waiting for the hostesses to do their rounds but repeatedly going up the back and asking for new drinks. Sometimes he summons them by the call bell, at which point I ordered my drinks off the back of his summonsing and everyone was happy (except the hostess). Four hours into the flight I was pleasantly squiffy which why it was a shock, whilst wandering up the aisle one time, for my eyes to rest on someone I knew – the manager/director of the subcontractor group I manage back in Manchester in fact. Blurry eyed, in my ASDA combats and airline food stained Barbie pink vest top, I had to snap unexpectedly into professional mode – it was a jar to the system. As it was, he claimed it was the neatest he had ever seen me. I wasn’t quite sure how to take that.

 

It turns out he was going to the same trade show as I was, not surprising really. He was also meeting the same people as I was independently – that was slightly more sneaky and I knew there would be repercussions later. More vitally though, he had got a hire car and I was able to blag a lift from the airport to the hotel with him. He’d just asked his company to hire him something with sat nav, but on the bus over to the hire car depot he started to hanker after something more sporty like a mustang. I tried my hardest to get him to change his car order to a Hummer and he even asked at the desk but apparently the last one had gone, as had all the sporty two seater things so we were stuck with a dull and boring 5 door Pontiac. Then, just as we were readying to set off, my boss pinged me saying he’d managed to catch an earlier flight, where was I, and could he blag a lift in my taxi. Thus in the end, the manager person had to ferry around the two of us instead.

 

 

 

Downtown Disney, not sure what I was expecting but it definitely wasn’t what I found. I guess I imagined the whole town to be like the Magic Kingdom. I expected this massive enclosed complex like a vast, sprawling Alton Towers with Mickey Mouses (Mickey Mice? Mickey Mouseses?) and kiddies holding balloons and wearing mouse ear beanies wandering around everywhere. As it was, it was just a very spread out American city, all Freeways and 5-and-dimes and McDonald’s golden arches. On the fringes of the Disney ‘district’ there was a smallish plastic purple sign with Mickey on announcing you are now in Downtown Disney, and then all the verges start to look neatly manicured with grass (a challenge in these latitudes) and sprinklers and exotic looking bushes and huge palm trees. The roads were still lined with Taco bells and Denny’s though in between all the large Vegas style hotels, and there still wasn’t a Mickey mouse or a beanie hatted kid in sight.

 

Our hotel was one of the slightly more upmarket ones. On the street of upmarket hotels, it was the slightly shabbier one, but later when we went for a walk around Kissimmee where all the Norman Bates style $23-a-night-joints and Walmart’s can be found, we realised we could have done a lot, lot worse. Our work friend dropped us off, then we checked in and settled down for an hour or so in our rooms until the third member of our party (who had arrived a day earlier) got back from the show to meet us for lunch.

 

We didn’t require anything fancy, so we wandered over to the nearest mall (On foot! You never see any Americans walking on the streets in districts like these and the only people we ever passed on the sidewalks were speaking with UK accents). The humidity was high and the air felt like a steam room. It was filled with the strange scent of tropical flowers and I was fascinated by some dangling stuff hanging from all the bushes and palm trees. Pulling bits off and inspecting it (apologising to my bemused companions and explaining that I had done a degree in botany), it looked at first glance like some sort of lichen or perhaps an air plant but now I’ve looked it up and its actually a bromeliad called ‘Spanish Moss’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_moss). I pulled a huge hunk off on the way back to the hotel and sneaked it through customs back into the UK. Now it’s in my greenhouse...I give it approximately a 10-20% chance of survival.

We dined at a Tex Mex style place, so it was fajitas and tacos and enchiladas all round, with frozen strawberry margaritas the size of buckets to round it all off. Ambling back, the sky was lit up with wheeling spot lights of some kind and I wondered if that was where the Magic Kingdom was. I sucked in the heady tropical air and thought….hmmm….I could live in a place like this. I wonder what the pay is to dress up like Goofey and smack children round the head all day? I’ll look it up tomorrow….

Well today I'm flying to Florida on a business trip. It is *not* a holiday, glossing over the fact that the conference I am going to is based in Disneyland, as is the hotel.

At the moment I'm at the airport enduring the ritual strip search that is security. Checkin was great though. Ah hah haar hah ha I've somehow bagged 'Premium Economy' class on the plane, I don't know how that slipped through the accounts dept. Wider seats! 2 extra cms of recline! Real cultery! Prioritised baggage reclaim! And here am I with a Barbie pink rolling suitcase and ASDA brand combats standing in line with all the suits.

Maybe I'll get sat next to a film star...maybe I should pretend I'm a film star...hmm

I was in the IOM this weekend for my birthday. It was a nice sunny day on Saturday (a rare thing for the Island) so Mum and I nipped out to Fleshwick Bay which is just up the road from us, and she took me to see the garden of ‘The guy with the gnomes’. This guy lived out in the back of beyond but had a reputation for having a vast array of garden gnomes which was so bad it was good. It had been a while since Mum had popped down to look at them, and in those days ‘all’ he had was a front garden full of painted plaster gnomes. When we arrived today however, we found he had updated his repertoire somewhat.

 

As you can see from the photo album, the nutty sod has started painting trees. He also has a large and disturbing range of scarecrows, all made from bits and pieces he has picked up off the beach. He’s also started cutting his hedge in the shape of weird and wonderful animals, and around the back of the house he’s started shoving dustbin lids into a tree and calling it ‘The Orange Submarine’.

 

We stood outside for a while, taking photographs and looking aghast. He came out eventually, quite a mild chap who thought nothing of his creation, to him it was just something you do, and all he was worried about was that he thought he wasn’t very good at making faces. He pointed out some of the features, such as the guy on a swing and the Apache Indian, and the sticks painted like snakes and the old motorbike, and Mum said he ought to write to the local paper and get a feature. He didn’t seem to be bothered though, as is often the Manx way. Too much effort, you’d only start attracting people who ‘don’t come from around here’.

 

We left him too it, quietly plodding around his field of frozen figures with his walking stick and his pipe. Wonder what he’s going to do next when his garden gets full. Start painting the sheep?

 

The Canadian Business Trip #4

 

Nothing I can say about the meetings again. Eggs Benedict for breakfast. A packet of Nerds for lunch. I was tired as soon as I woke up that morning and my energy levels didn’t improve as the day wore on.

 

We headed for the airport around 2:30pm. I got my bosses luggage out of the taxi while he paid for it, then told him I had tampered with it since he had packed it and that he had to tell that to the check-in people. He cursed me roundly. Then we split up soon after as he was flying to Heathrow and myself and my travelling companion to Newark. We ended up in a scabby little backwater terminal with no food facilities except for one bar (with possibly the most hostile reaction I have ever witnessed to no tip even though we had to scratch around for pennies to pay the whole bill without a credit card and get rid of all our Canadian money - the waiter basically walked off in disgust). My boss eventually texted me and told me all about the Executive lounge he was in with free beer and internet access. I cursed him roundly.

 

Newark was no better on the way back. We didn’t have to suffer immigration twice, but no-one told us that our luggage was automatically transferred so we spent an hour standing next to the baggage retrieval belt labelled for Ottawa until the flight name finally disappeared off the list and my companion had to physically retrain me from marching off and punching someone at the Baggage Reclaim Customer Services Desk as I, by this time, was rather tired and grumpy. He was still coping reasonably well with it all, thank god, and it was he who calmed me down, made me queue, and asked the officials very sweetly what had happened to our luggage. It was he who established that our luggage had been automatically transferred after all, and he who suggested that we have a nice sit down afterwards to calm down. At least one good thing was gotten out of it - while we sat around at reclaim we listened to the accents all around us and experimented to see if we could now tell the difference between a Canadian and an American accent. Alas, we still could not.

 

We walked all the way to the end of Newark Terminal C and looked longingly for one last time at the Manhattan skyline (which again we had seen when we were flying in). Incidentally, on the flight out of Newark to Ottawa we were sat in seats 4B and 4C – we were both given a crappy little bag of Pretzels and both stuffed them into our seat pockets instead of eating them. On the way back, I was in seat 3B but my companion was in seat 4B and lo and behold, he found a bag of Pretzels stuffed into the seat pocket. Being the cynic, I suggested it was the very same bag of Pretzels I had stuffed down there 4 days earlier. It was a shame he couldn’t have leant over and checked whether there were any Pretzels in the seat pocket of seat 4C to prove it, however it would probably have freaked out the guy sitting there. Either way, it was a poor indication of the level of cleaning that went on between those flights. Either that, or mostly everyone else thought the same about the crappy little packets of Pretzels as we did. If anyone is reading this and doing the same journey – could you uniquely mark your bag of Pretzels and conduct an experiment for me…?

 

The main flight home was great. I was desperately tired but I bagged a row to myself and schooshed over to the window seat to watch as the flight skirted the coast from New York all the way to the tip of