Hat Fair 2009

English Gents @ Hat Fair 2009

Another year, another Hat Fair. It’s becoming something of a tradition for Dan and me. We first went together in 2007, when we were first getting together as a couple. (Though the main thing that I remember from that year is being ridiculously hung over from the night before when I went to Point in the Park in Eastleigh and stayed up until 2am drinking wine.) I bought a hat, all was good fun. Last year was pretty cool as well.

This year I had two goals – 1) Get some cool photos on my digital SLR, as it was last year’s Hat Fair that inspired me to want one, 2) Get a new hat – my awesome Hat Fair hat of awesome got broken at the Isle of Wight festival, soI needed a new one.

Well I got loads of photos which will be uploaded to flickr at some point, but I failed to get a hat exactly like my old one.

In terms of acts my favourite this year was the English Gents, pictured above, they did some truly amazing acrobatic feats. Brilliant.

Haggis and Charley seemed less awesome this year. It was the same old patter, and their hearts didn’t seem to be in it this time.

We also saw a troupe of four whose act centred around one of the girls being bad at all the acrobatics in a scarily clumsy fashion which probably took twice as much skill to pull off. It was good and funny until they went into a long skit on bottles of water, which lost our interest so we wandered off to see some other acts.

There was an interesting mechanical structure in one corner of the field which I thought might have an interesting show associated. Unfortunately when the show came on it was quite boring and quite far up its own arse. Another thing we walked away from early.

The rest of the acts were pretty good, we stayed to the end before coming home to make chilli and watch zombie movies.

Isle of Wight Festival

Last weekend I went to my first festival: the Isle of Wight Festival. It was a weekend of many firsts, my first time on the IOW, my first time camping, my first meeting with portaloos – yuk.

I had a great time! Saw some good bands that I hadn’t previously heard of, saw some great bands that I had heard of but hadn’t previously rated, deliberately missed out on a bunch of bands that I thought were over-rated.

Camping was more fun than I expected and I got some really good night’s sleep in the tent. Obviously I need a harder mattress at home. The tent got way too hot in direct sunlight – I’d wake up fairly early in the morning, but it would be the tent getting ridiculously hot that drove me out. The only downside of the camping was the portaloos, I don’t think I could camp for more than a few days in a row. The weather was pretty good too – only one or two drops of rain. Not sure what camping in the rain would be like.

I spent way too much money on random crap: 2 maxi dresses and 4 pairs of stripey socks. I love stripey socks. So much buying occurred that I ran out of money on the first day. Then my card wouldn’t work in their ATMs, uh oh. I spent an evening collecting cups (10p each to return for recycling) in order to get enough money for food. I did succeed in getting enough money for some grub, but I was too tired by that time. A friend loaned me money to tide me over the rest of the festival.

The cups thing is a very cool idea. If you’re concerted about it there’s lots of money to be had. It’s a good earner for kids. During the day there were loads of kids filtering through the crowds collecting people’s finished cups. Sometimes you could see these kids coming by the bobbing towers of cups that were above head height – probably nearly a tenners worthof cups at that point. I personally was a fairly poor cup collector – making only £4.

Post-festival downside – I got a really bad sore throat the following week. Bad enough for serious mickey taking from my colleagues (I squeak when talking and bark when coughing on sore throat occasions). Unlike the other member of our group who came away with a sore throat I don’t even have the excuse of kissing randoms to account for the germs I caught.

Glad to be back at home with my cats and my fella, but I don’t think that this will be my last festival.

Cool kaleidoscope images

I’ve just been playing around on: http://www.krazydad.com/kaleido/ using my Flickr pictures from the funfair the other day to make the funky circle images below.