Bear blog

Lizzy escorted us to the Outdoors Show at the NEC today. Ooh it was fun!

 

I've never been to the NEC before. It's rather large. And airporty. They even had travelators for fat Americans. I liked them at first but then I felt sick and wanted to get off. It took us about a million years (give or take) to get from the car park all the way round the building and down into the show. We had to stop off at three different ticket booths along the way because no one wanted to supply Pete with his ticket.

 

But we finally got there. Unfortunately, we missed Ray Mears' talk. It was probably about eating wood and pooing on leaves. I wanted him to sign my belly. I was somehwat placated by 'Irish music' going on in one corner in the near vacinity of a Guinness stall. They weren't giving away free stuff though so we moved on quite quickly. There were a couple of women who gave us a leaflet about things to do around Bungay. Handy, that. Then we wandered around for a bit picking up freebies and looking at pretty things. By the end of the day we had perfected the art of picking up freebies without being waylaid by the stall-runners. It was fun because it felt like stealing, but with only a small percentage of the guilt. 

 

I got a pencil from the Southern Uplands Way people, two pens from Craghoppers, an emergency fire starter from a Canadian man in a very pretty t-shirt, lots and lots and lots of mosquito repellant wipes, a random badge, two stickers, and one of those Things that you can snap onto your wrist from a Scottish bloke whose overt enthusiasm put me in mind of Mini. But in a good way. 

 

Then we watched a Ukranian man fail to climb a wall, and a man called Fat Tony who was commentating on some trial biking. They were jumping and spinning and bouncing all over the place.It was terribly entertaining. Fat Tony didn't believe that you could do it on a uni. Alas, Pete hadn't brought his 24 with him to prove it. Tut. We ate roast pig in bread and snacked on satsumas and Lizzy and I bought some terribly fetching T-shirts (after having spotted them in passing a while earlier and spending what felt like hours wandering around trying to find them again). And then we watched the Royal Marines jump from the ceiling and start fighting each other like professional wrestlers. They were doing the shouting and smacking themselves in the chest and making faces and everything. 

 

Best of all, spending a day in an air-conditioned building has done wonders for my snotty cold. It's just a pity that we were sampling the delights of life in the great outdoors in a big dark hole on such a glorious sunny day.