06.09.09
Festen
Life continues to be fun.
I’ve spent the last couple of weekends with R and her daughter (N).
Last weekend was spent visiting Lincoln with R and meeting up with my folks for a meal and a couple of drinks. The Bank hols was spent with both of them at the Beacon Hill Wood Fair. This was a strange event of “learning about woods”. It should have been awful but was actually a nice way to spend a day.
N got to see a scary green wild man telling stories, me and R got to eat nice food including a self-made pizza and some proper burger. After that N went climbing and very nearly rode in a cherry-picker. Then we watched some countryfied version of the World’s Strongest Man with some butch lumberjacks chopping logs for our amusement.
As I said, very strange.
This weekend was spent in Derby watching some stuff at the “Derby Feste“. We saw the opening thing which had 2 groups of kids wandering into Derby square and playing an annoyingly repetitive riff over and over and over and over…..
Each group had their own mascot. One had a bird thing. The other had what we assume was meant to be the Derby Ram. In reality it was a bloke in a costume carrying a huge sheeps head thing. It was rubbish. Really very bad. It looked like it was manky from years of lying in a cupboard and patched together with bandages. It was horrible at best and scary at worst. Just nasty.
Anyway after about 3 months of them playing this tedious riff they headed off again, still playing it. We zoomed off to a small park where the fest had set up a stage.
Once there we found a small group of folk. Some of them clearly just liked hanging around the square normally and seemed mildly annoyed at this intrusion into their Sunday afternoon. The rest had, like us, a mild curiosity at just what was going on.
One small group seemed to be a juggling group. They had one guy juggling 3 teddy bears and then a couple of them doing quite basic diabolo tricks. After an hour or so they all stood up and then spent the rest of the afternoon playing catch with not 3 balls each, not 4 balls each, but 1 ball between them. Very poor. Earlier in the day I’d been thinking about going over and chatting but even my measly juggling skills would have shown this group up badly.
So the fun on stage starts. A hip and happening guy comes out giving it all “Come on Deeeerrrrrbbyyy!!!!” to muffled “hello”s and such from the mainly apathetic crowd. He witters on with some (I guess) street vocab for a bit until very few know what he’s on about. At this point he decides to do the “tell the crowd what to do” schtick that I loathe.
So we have to cheer when he shouts one thing and scream “Derby Feste” when he shouts another. N loved it, for about 3 minutes. When you’re boring to a 4 year old then you really need to change your spiel.
Then who shows up but the parading kids and their loathsome riff. Yes they’re still playing it, still annoying as hell.
The musicians turn out to be part of a Latin band that starts the show. Some good music and some dodgy singing later they depart to be replaced by a duo doing ukelele covers (oh the originality!). This would have been good if they’d bothered doing anything any good and maybe shortening some of the long songs. EG they did Thriller in its entirety. Come on guys give us a break and boil it down to the bits we know; that way we might not get bored off our tits with you. And no, we won’t be buying your CD.
After this we had a tired 4 year old on our hands so we went home. I don’t think we missed a lot.
Photos from Wood Fair here.