Monday 4 May 2009

i hate phantom space man


A couple of weeks ago, Matt "Say What You Want About The Tenets Of National Socialism, At Least It's An Ethos" Smith and Laura decided to go to Bristol's annual Italian car show (rather than accidentally stumble upon it, as they have done for the last few years), and they were kind enough to invite me along too. Unsurprisingly, the Italian Car Show consisted mainly of Italian cars... (click each picture for more photos)

Ferrari...



...Maserati...


...Lamborghini...


...Alfa Romeo...


...Lancia...


...and Ascari, which is actually a British car, but is named after an Italian racing driver, so that's okay.


Apparently only 17 of those Ascaris were ever built; and only 9 of those are still in existence, the remaining 8 having been "destroyed" (presumably by overenthusiastic owners who ran out of talent at some key moment). You'd have thought the owner of this one might have bothered to clean it...

The day after I found myself in London with the family, visiting Dr Sister in her nice new house. Well, some of the time was spent in her shiny new house; the rest of it was spent racing around the neighbouring town of Pinner.

In a wheelbarrow.


The rules were quite simple; each team must consist of two people, and one of them must be in the wheelbarrow at all times. The other one gets to push. There are five checkpoints, and you must each down half a pint at every checkpoint. The first team to arrive at the car park of the Queens Head is the winner.

As it happens, we were the last team to arrive at the car park of the Queens Head, but we at least retained some small amount of dignity by not being sick at any of the checkpoints.

And the next weekend, Matt and I got dragged to some weird ass shenanigan by Alan and Dory. Dory didn't give much away about the details of said shenanigan; but our suspicions were aroused by the presence of men in faceless masks, riding impossibly tall bicycles and jousting against imaginary foes whilst we queued...

Turns out we were queuing up to get into Carny Ville, a moderately insane steam punk Victorian freak show apparition.


And it was freakin' cool. Here's a tiny bit of what happened.
  • Some chick put a spoon in her nose and served tea.
  • Dory played on a severed head coconut shy.
  • Lobotomized twins messed about on silks.
  • Matt played ping-pong with the devil.
  • I got summoned onto stage for a dance-off against a guy called Barry in front of, like, a thousand people.
  • Ghosts walked down the side of a building.
  • The whole thing ended with an apocalyptic turn-off-the-century outdoors dance party.

More (crappy) photos here.

Amazing.

4 comments:

Marianne said...

Your crazy shenanigans with your sister make me lament my only childness. Though, I wouldn't want you to be my sibling, that would be weird.

The Pixie said...

I want to come to the next circus outing.... I feel the need to wear extravagant corstery and ruffles... possibly not together though

Matt said...

Played ping-pong with the Devil... and WON!

The Jolly Blogger said...

The circus outing sounds cool, I think I'll invite myself along next time.


Your sister is still hot.