Started Saturday as i do every Saturday, listening to the Adam and Joe show on Radio 6. Joe was back this week, and I did all the things I should have done yesterday or the day before or the day, pottering about in the kitchen, making coffee, poring over my laptop, washing up the mug I'd just made coffee in, drying it, and then using the exact same mug to make coffee in. I finished reading the Hampshire Chronicle. Basically, any excuse to stay in the kitchen listening to radio and not having to unplug the radio, take it somewhere else in the house, and then plug it in again and retune it. It wasn't a particularly memorable Adam and Joe Show, and they especially teed me off my by announcing they weren't going to be on for the next three weeks, although one week they are going to be replaced by David Quantick who is better than everything, as anyone who used to listen to Collins and Maconie's Hit Parade on Radio 1 in the mid nineties, or read Quantick's World in Select. Or maybe even the hundreds of things he's done since, but I can't name any so I won't. Text the Nation was good, all about sitcom.
The Hat Fair traditionally reaches full strength on the Saturday. The Sunday is a lacklustre affair where the entire shebang ups sticks and sets up in Oram's Arbour, a splattering of grass and beech trees in a different part of town, near my old dentist and halfway to my school. It used to be a drinking ground for 16 year olds, but not on Hat Fair Sunday. You basically get all the magic and mayhem of the previous two days events, only crammed onto some grass that's too small to house it, and nobody's drunk, and there are dogs and bees and shit everywhere. I think I've been on the Sunday once, and this year, I'm not going to double my experiences. To counteract these, I decided to rinse as much circus water from the dirty Hat Fair dishcloth today. So as it was, I arrived in town to see the performances, right from the very second they started. Bad news for me then, that the first performer anywhere in town, was the same idiot Scottish woman, who looked even more today like a cross between Helena Bonham Carter, a cartoon with and Jude, the old receptionist in Casualty with a nose piercing. She was as bad as the previous day, her act appeared on every level to cover the exact same territory every single time. The only difference appeared the be that people were actually watching her, and enjoying here. Clearly the bonus of busybusy Saturday and a different pitch, in the Broadway, helped. The Broadway isn't as exciting as it sounds, it's just a stretch of road where buses go up and down and cars park in a zig-zag fashion leading up towards the big statue of King Alfred which sits on a plinth at the head of The Broadway. This area is normally a road, but to annoy drivers even more than merely closing half the parks does, they close one of the main roads into Winchester off as well, and let people juggle there instead. This is where the Scottish woman was doing her act, and I didn't want to loiter anywhere near her in case she ripped my head off and stole my wallet, so I went back up to the cathedral. My deja vu vein started throbbing as once again, I turned out the cathedral close and the Irish gobshite and Swedish accomplice were doing their trapeze thing yet again. I almost couldn't believe what I was seeing, and double backed immediately, and went back down the town. This to-ing and fro-ing went on far too long, to break up the tedium I went into Blockbuster and told the woman behind the counter that she should definitely watch Funny Games because it was really good. It is really good, but I was worried she might not like it very much, hunt me down, and break my legs with a golf club. She seemed impressed when I said "it's got the bald guy from The Lives of Others in it" as if suggesting the two films were in any way similar.
Out on the street, there was a fantastic act calling themselves The Urban Playground, which basically revolved around six people dancing, jumping, doing acrobatics and basically acting like human fleas over the top of some makeshift scaffolding planted steadily in the middle of the street. In other words, free running, break dancing and six shades of awesomeness, for 45 minutes. Terrific stuff, and probably the only act of the entire weekend which stepped out of the very pip-pip hippy ethos, and all the better for it. The only downside was the soundtrack music, which had "written especially for the show" all over it, combination of diabolical trance breakbeat guff, and a child with pro-tools and a copy of Exit Planet Dust. Rubbish, but I'd watch these cats doing turning somersaults and backflipping over their own shoulder blades wearing dinner jackets, to the sound of Greensleeves if it works. I'd rather see that, actually, with all of the gung-ho urban warriors decked out as Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. But that was not to be, and I walked back up town to watch the bloody Scottish woman again who was set up opposite the buttercross. The Indian chap from yesterday was back at the bottom of town. I felt like I was stuck in a nightmare set in a hall of mirrors, and it was starting to make me feel uncomfortable. Walking into the Abbey Grounds to find that the Train Station people had set up there and were halfway through their act, was the last straw, even though there was a barbecue set up in the far corner of the Abbey Grounds and the smell of minted lamb and DIY sausages was steaming across the flower beds. There was also some ludicrous sideshows that weren't there the previous day, which cost far too much to take part in, and the prizes included a variety of plastic guns. BROKEN BRITAIN. I went home.
I had planned to go back in to watch some of the evening performances, but a quick scan of a programme I picked up told me that all I was going to see was The Urban Playground again only in the rain, and although I was secretly tempted by the idea of seeing them all slip up on the wet pavement and break their necks, doing a You've Been Framed, but I thought better. The alternative were a wanko jazz band, and slitting my wrists. I took option D and stayed at home and watched the rain from the spare bedroom in the house until my parents got home. I'd love to say that the Hat Fair experience of 2008 wasn't a let down or a disappoint, but I can't lie about it. After nine years, I was expecting better, but as I sat in the spare bedroom and logged on and off the Internet like an indecisive sheepdog, I realised that the Hat Fair was never good in the first place, and all the interest and excitement was entirely of my own creation, and the natural instinct to believe that things get better in time. A different matter altogether, but The Truck Festival in Oxford, I went to that in 2001, and then every year until 2005. By the last time I went, it was big and busy enough to have extra fields for camping, and bands people had heard of playing. This year, the Lemonheads are playing. In my naivety, I thought The Hat Fair might have blown up too, and be bigger, more exciting, and terrific. All that was improved was a few stalls set up in a car park, and some sort of pyrotechnics shit that I missed because I thought it was on the Saturday night, and it wasn't. The sheer fact that the highlight of the weekend was a solo pub crawl that largely ignored all facets of the Hat Fair, and then listening to the Durutti Column, tells the whole story. In the evening, My parents drove me out to Sainsbury's for shopping. The whole store was full of attractive twenty-something couples buying organic olive oil and red wine vinegar and I felt sick and wanted to leave.
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