We’ve Gone Ape!

Back in March Charlotte and Alien very kindly gave us a voucher for an excellent day out at http://www.GoApe.co.uk which we finally got around to making use of this weekend at the very lovely Forestry Commission site of Wendover Woods. Go Ape is an outdoor activity involving a course of walkways strung between trees high above the ground. You have to wear a harness and attend a full safety briefing before tackling the course but once up in the trees you are left to your own devices. The safety system is very simple and easy to learn and the first few stages quite easy, but it gets tougher as you progress around the course. There are several zip-wire descents which are great fun, and one particularly scary jump from quite a height out into thin air – attached by a pulley to a cable which slams you into some rope netting about 30ft off the ground. That was exhilarating I have to say!!

We both loved it and would recommend it to anyone. Even if you are scared of heights! Many thanks again to Charlotte & Alien for a fab treat 🙂

U2 @ Wembley

On Saturday we saw U2 put on an absolutely awesome performance at Wembley. Smeeta was able to get free tickets through RIM (the Blackberry people) who are sponsors of the worldwide ‘360degrees’ Tour so we were able to drag Tara, Bhavisha, Alpesh and Andy & Carole along too. The set was stunning – a revolving video wall made of hundreds of individual segments hung above the stage showing a mix of live pictures and computer controlled graphics. This was suspended from a huge superstructure with a central spire sticking up way into the sky from which spotlights and lasers lit up the sky.

None of this detracted from the music either – a storming set of new and old songs, including most of my own favourites from ‘New Years Day’ to ‘Ultraviolet’ to ‘Vertigo’ and my current fave: ‘Magnificent’. And even a snippet of the old final encore song ‘40’ crept in at the end of ‘Bad’. The performance was right up there but the bass was completely lacking in mid-range for some reason which was a shame. Fantastic show though, as you would expect!

New ‘Zorst

A guy from the BenelliForum recently trashed his Tornado at Silverstone (apparently chasing an R1-mounted Jamie Witham!!). His pride and joy was a complete write-off so he had no use for the custom-made MotoGP style exhaust he’d recently purchased. So I gladly took it off his hands 🙂
It’s handmade in stainless steel and contains a powervalve licenced from Harris Performance Products which optimises the exhaust gas flow for better performance right through the rev range. Can’t vouch for that yet but it sounds awesome – more of a rasp than standard. And it looks much more modern than the big fat cylindrical style.

Banksy Statement

On Saturday morning we queued for two hours outside the old Bristol University Refectory where my parents probably spent many hours loitering with varying degrees of intent. (It is now a Brown’s Bistro). We were queueing for entry to the very popular Banksy Exhibition at Bristol Museum. And it was well worth the wait – a wide variety of his work was on display, ranging from humourous to poignant and startling. A very welcome celebration of one of Bristol’s favourite sons.

S. – This was our second attempt at visiting this Exhibition, the first time was a couple of weeks ago, and we gave up on the queue because we thought it was too long! We decided to give it another go, turning up early (9.30am) on a Saturday morning – and we still had to queue for 2 hours, at least it wasn’t raining this time!