Firework night 5/11/2010

Its the thats time again ... chuck your guy Fawkes effigy on the bomfire and set off the fireworks because its bonfire night!

For the second year in a row Jacqui and I headed down to Ashburn sports park to watch the fireworks, eat undercooked and over priced hot dogs and freeze our arses of in the cold night air. The fire works were as lovely as fireworks can be (come on admit it - they give you neck ache and get boring after the first five), and then we played some of the games on the stalls. Jane won a fish - I don't know if it is still alive or not. My guess is not.

After all the excitement we went too the pub to warm up.

I wanted to go on this, but no one would go on with me - bastards!

Jane and her fish

Rosebud Ceramics, Sunderland

9/10/2010

In the summer Holly and Socks discovered Rosebud Ceramics, a place where you can go and paint a bowl or a plate or a dinosaur or something else made of clay. When I got back, I made them take me there. On thursday Socks and I went and subsequently made a santa shaped bowl and a dinosaur clown. I finished santa on the day, but Socks needed to finish dinozo, so we went back on saturday with Holly. Bellow are pictures of the lovely things we made.

My Father Christmas bowl

DINOZO - half dinosaur, half clown

Hollys emo, skate board name plate

My sea themed bowl

It costs around £10-£20 depending on what you want to paint, and if you don't finish it in one go you can return and paint it at a later date. Your object is then glazed and fired, we get out things back thursday! *Excited face*

The end result:

Octo-bowl!

Super crab

Socks with Dinozo and Balthazar

FRANCE - HOLIDAY - GIVERNY

3/9/2010

On our second day we went to Monet's house and gardens at Giverny, the house has been restored to how it looked (or maybe just preserved) when Claude Monet lived there. The gardens were amazing and packed with hundreds and hundreds of different kinds of flowers.

Lucy, Ellen and I were definitely the youngest people there, as the only other visitors were about 3 bus loads of american, middle aged tourists. The high light - or low light depending on how you view it - was hearing one of them actually say "Bob I feel like a kid in a candy store!"... Lucy nearly puked.

Monets very pink house

View from the bedroom window

Sunflowers

Path ways though the flowers

Umbrella things to support the trees

This flower was bigger than my head

We walked around the garden admiring the flowers, we went through the underground tunnel and explored the famous water lily garden.

Lucy and Ellen by the ponds

Ellen with Claude Monets head.

FRANCE - HOLIDAY - VERSAILLES!!

2/9/2010

We stopped at Vernon for 2 nights because we wanted to visit Versailles and Giverny (which was 5 minutes away). The first day we decided to go to Versailles because its such a huge place we thought we may as well spend the day there, and then have a couple of hours at Giverny the day after and before heading off to La Mothe.

Best breakfast ever!

After our incredible breakfast (which was served in out rooms), we set of towards Paris and the Palace at Versailles. After and hours drive we got there and after a rather pesky dalliance with a parking metre we walked up the massive drive to the Palace. We approached Versaille from the garden first so our first impression of the place was of the huge landscaped gardens and masses of nearly naked statues with strategically placed robes/fig leaves that were spread all over the garden. As first impressions go it wasn't a bad one! From the top of the steps you look down the grande promenade to the two square lakes at the bottom, its an incredible view, I'm glad I'm not one of the gardeners who works there!

We then walked around the front of the Palace and queued up to go inside, the best part was that because we were under 26 we count as students and so got free entry, thus saving ourselves about 12 euros - woo! The palace is huge (as it should be the king of France did live there after all) and they are restoring all the gilt/gold fixtures on the top of the roofs and the gate. In all honesty I think it looks horrible, far too bright, but hey its not my palace so who am I to complain.

Lucy and Ellen outside the front gates

Versailles

The mirror gallery

The Hall of Battles

After we had walked all the way around the palace and visited the gift shop ( the best part!) and tempted Ellen away from the macaroons, we walked through the garden and down to the lakes at the bottom. Lucy had pretty sever sun stroke by this point so went to sit in the shade while Ellen and I decided to be adventurous and rented a rowing boat.

One of the lakes

Its fair to say I am a bad rower. I'd never rowed before, so we went round in circles for most of the time, and when we got stuck at the edge, had to have advice yelled at us by a friendly maybe american tourist. He did offer to row us back across the lake though.

After that we went home as Lucy was quite ill.

Me in a rowing boat

FRANCE - HOLIDAY - BONJOUR!!

1/9/2010

Flag on the ferry

Ellen, Lucy and I went on holiday to France this summer, the trip itself was in good but also pretty bad. It was a make or break holiday. Anyway, we left at 6.30am and set off for Dover, the drive was easy except for when we got to the Dartford bridge and we were queuing for absolutely ages! Going over the bridge was fun though, but I always get worried on long bridges/ in long tunnels that they will break and ill either drown or plummet into the water and then drown, but luckily it didn't happen that day. We got to Dover and hour and a half early so paid £10 to switch our tickets and caught an earlier ferry.

Goodbye England! - The white cliffs of Dover

Lucy and I were both really nervous about going on the ferry, the last time I went on a ferry was when I was 12, and I spent the whole 2 hour journey feeling like my stomach was trying to make a dash for the emergency exit - that exit being my mouth! Lucy has also had a similarly retch inducing experience. But all our worrying was for nothing, the crossing was smooth and was really sunny outside so we stood on the deck for a bit and got blown about by the wind.

Best illustrative picture of the wind

Calm seas

After we trundled of the ferry and onto dry land, I had more to worry about.. driving on the correct side of the road! This was really scary and Ellen and Lucy were really nice about my driving, not even yelling at me when we had a couple of near misses with other cars. Driving on - what to me is - the wrong side of the road, turned out to be pretty simple, just follow all the other drivers and everything seems to work out ok, the only exception to this rule being roundabouts.. then its a case of looking for a gap and praying you can execrate fast enough to join the mad scramble.

L'Hermitage, Vernon

After a peaceful 4 hour drive we arrived at Vernon, where we were staying for 2 nights on before we continued on to La Mothe Achard which was another 4 hours drive west. We stayed at a beautiful B&B called L'Hermitage, where we stayed in a suite and all felt very important. The room was huge and next morning we were told breakfast was served in our rooms, so we were all eagerly awaiting 9am and the breakfast bell.

The inside and outside of The Birds Suite

On The Roof ... 2!

There are many, many things about our new house that I hate. For example, the bathroom resembles some kind of underwater dungeon, the walls and floor are permanently wet, and because of this we now have mould growing anywhere it can get a foot hold. The ceiling, skirting boards, walls even the toilet roll holder has not been spared in the great mould invasion of autumn 2010. This problem has a solution: Ventilation and heat. Since I showered yesterday I made the game changing tactic of leaving the window open which dried the room out nicely - now we are leaving the window open all the time. So now although it feels like you've undertaken a trek to the antarctic when you need a wee at 3am, and its always a bit of a surprise when you can prize yourself off of the frozen toilet seat, but at least the floor isn't like a light bog and the toilet roll is dry rather than damp. Now hopefully when we scrape the mould from the walls it won't grow back.

Anyway, enough moaning, I won't complain about the rest of the house - although the living room carpet has to be seen to be believed - I'll now talk about my favourite part of the house, which is the roof. As I've mentioned before in a previous blog post we can get onto roof at the back of the house by climbing out of Sock's bedroom window, so on monday night the boys and I decided to venture on to roof and have an impromptu house warming party.

View from the roof

We took alcohol up with us - yes, I know this could have all ended in tears, but it didn't - and some snacks and had a couple of hours just sitting on the roof in the dark, till it got too cold and I went back inside. I also needed a wee, but unlike the boys I was too polite to piss off the roof and into the back 'garden' so had to go back and use a real toilet (how boring!).

Simon with the snacks and drinks

Socks

I'd never been up on the highest part of the roof before, mainly because I'm sensible (scared) but the boys were all experts as they'd been up before so stood sniggering while I tried to climb up without plummeting onto the concrete below. It felt really high up when we were on the roof - which i suppose it was - and we all had collective heart attacks when someone went too close to the edge - that person was never me, I was just imagining myself falling over the edge so I stayed in the middle.

Peeg and I on the roof

We stayed on the roof for a couple of hours, just drinking and talking, imagining what we would say to the police , if for some reason they turned up and demanded us to get down, then Si, Peeg and Sock's got all interested in the sky and pretended to be talking knowledgable about the plow etc ... I'm pretty sure non of them knew what they were talking about.

Next day I found lucozade bottles and beer cans scattered on the street below where the wind had blown them off the roof as we had been too lazy to take them down with us. Si also had to go back on the roof in the morning to retrieve his wallet.

Amateur star gazing

Latitude Festival 2010 - day 4 - Sunday - Suffolk

19/7/2010

Wooo last day! I was more than ready to go home by this point, no washing for 4 days and I was seriously in need of some after sun and flushing toilets! Talking of toilets the ones below were the ones in our campsite, they weren't as terrible as they could have been, but they were not good on Sunday.

The lovely toilets

We met up with Ruth early, and went to watch Tom Jones who was playing a second set on the main stage at 12pm. Joe really wanted to see him play and I tagged along , but left half way through to get lunch. The show ground was practically empty and there were no queues as everyone was watching Tom Jones, he must have drawn the largest crowd of the weekend.

Below is Ruth eating her breakfast of cold beans.

Ruth eating breakfast

Crowd for Tom Jones

After Tom Jones, we had a couple of hours free and so went back to paint out lockness monster and claim our medals at The house of Fairy Tales. I think you will agree they were expertly painted.

Ruth and I painting our Loch ness Monsters

My monster

In order to obtain out medals we had to dress up and have out photos taken, below is Ruth, I laughed till I cried when I saw her dressed like this. I even smeared my face paint moustache.

To get a medal we had to dress up, this was Ruths costume

One the pictures from the photo booth. I have the original in my wallet.

After the excitement of being medal winners, Joe and I went and listened to children's story hour. Which was awesome, and I think Joe had a nap.

Childrens story time

Despite having a great weekend, I didn't think Latitude was as good as previous years. The core demographic had changed, when I went in 2008, I got the feeling that the group of 18/19/20 year olds I went with were in the minority, and that the place was over run by parents with lots of children under the age of 10. But this time, I think Latitude suffered a teen invasion, and i didn't see as many small children with their parents - there were still plenty but there were definitely more teenagers. I didn't really have a problem with them, I mean a lot of them were there just posing in sparkly new wellies that had never encountered mud before, but they didn't really get in my way.

But there was something that just wasn't right at this years event. Theres been a lot of discussion on the Latitude forums and I get the feeling that a lot of people blame the different atmosphere on the teenagers and the fact that there were more main stream headlines, and I think the majority of people want to become a smaller more exclusive and alternative festival once again. Then there were the two rapes that rocked the family friendly festival that happened on the thursday and friday nights, signs went up all over the place and apparently there was increased security. Although saying that I didn't see a single police officer all weekend.

I think I'm going to take this chance to say that I am officially retiring from festivals. I never really went to them for the music anyway, its not something I'm very interested in, but every time I go to a festival I'm always bored to tears by the live music that I don't enjoy. I prefer watching comedy etc. But combined with this fact and that I'm not very good at camping I don't think I'll be going to another one, I don't enjoy being there to justify spending almost £200 on a weekend ticket, maybe I'll just become a day tripper instead - but only if there is a band I really want to see.