Great North Fun Day 3

As well as the music festival there's lots of art and/ or comedy street theatre taking place and sometimes it's hard to know which is which.

Guess where the carnival was?

Today started with the carnival, one of the longest in the uk apparently, and we were promised a grand finale in the church fields. This grand finale turned out to be 24 hours in the life of Stockton acted out via music and dance. Fair enough. What surprised me though was that incorporated into it was a representation of a bunch of teenagers binge drinking and throwing up in the streets.  I'm not denying it's part of life, it just seemed odd to see it celebrated...

As there wasn't much at the music festival that appealed today we opted to take in some of the street theatre and try as many new and different things as possible, and here's the list of what we saw;

* Steve got invited into a 150 year old French fairground machine that involved peering through a face sized door at a theatre scene controlled by a complex system of wires and pulleys.
* Three interpretive dancers wafting around on a rope and pulley system several feet above the ground.

Piano on a pole.

* A truly amazing 50 minute recreation of a Buster Keaton movie.
* A "whispering rickshaw" ride where noone whispered but I did get a fortune cookie.
* A man playing a vertical grand piano 4m in the air while a movie was projected onto its lid.
* A young teenage girl surrounded by her mates, drunk out of her brains and heaving up all over the pavement just after 7pm. Though sadly this time it was 'real life' and not a continuation of the carnival finale.

In amongst all of the we saw some more dodgy comedy and made our first, and hopefully last, ever visit to Subway.  The food was dire but it was worth it to see the kid ahead of us order a roll including tandoori chicken, tuna mayo, olives, chillis, gherkins and just about everything else from the salad counter and then asking for it to be toasted!

Whilst we're on the subject of food I was impressed to see that there was a 'Healthy Options' catering van in amongst the burger vans at the festival but I was rather less impressed to see it sold a range of white baguettes stuffed with such healthy things as fried bacon and steak & fried onion. I'm not convinced the salad included on a BLT qualifies it as being healthy.

The Festival

If our arteries make it we'll be back at the festival tomorrow for the highlight of the three days for me - Justin Currie. Watch this space!