The Circus Came To Town

It was a gorgeous day today so we did the usual and headed off to Seaton Carew. The tide was on its way out and had left great swathes of seacoal on the sands. Much of this is just gravel size.

But some pieces are worth stopping to pick up, specially if you have a coal fire or two. This is the size of piece that we gather. I have left my foot in the pic to give some scale. Today we found the largest piece we have ever come across. It was the size of a brick.

It is on the right of the collection which we brought home today. It won't see us through the winter but it will add to our pleasure when we light a fire, to know that it was "hunter-gatherer" gained. We will save the large piece for the New Year fire. I never finished the Geological Map of England jigsaw which is why you never saw it finished on my blog. I couldn't cope with all the unmarked white pieces and put it away. But this one I'm proud to say...I finished. It was a special one with a fancy edge. It was advised by the instructions (Yes Dear Reader! A jigsaw with instructions) that you start from the large centre piece and work outwards. So I did. It took three days. This pic below shows how to remove the edges when you have finished so that it is ornately self-framed.

This is the whole, finished, done thing. It comes with varnish so that you can adhere the pieces and arrange for framing. No thankyou. It is now back in its box, ready to be returned or forwarded to another afficionado.This is the first time I've loaded a you-tube clip so I hope it works and thankyou to all appropriate people. I had trouble placing it so you might like to read the rest first...or not.

The circus came to town at the start of the week. It set up camp in a field at the bottom of Brusselton Hill, just over a mile away. So we went! It was called Circus Vegas but didn't seem to have anything to do with Las Vegas except for some amazing American style trucks. When we were in France we saw a circus moving along the autoroute in the opposite direction. It seemed to go on for ever; truck after truck towing trailers and caravans all highly decorated and very garish. This was much the same but I have no pics because I forgot to take my camera.

The acts were great and in the second half "Captain Munoz" was shot from a cannon just a few feet from us, right up to the apex of the Bigtop and then landed in a safety net on the other side of the Ring. Captain Munoz was shaped very much like a cannon ball with limbs and a head, so I suppose he wasn't destined to go very much further. The finale was the you-tube clip you see above (I borrowed it from GRMAINS, who filmed it the month before in Middlesbrough) and on the night we were there THREE riders rode around inside at the same time. Two lads and a lass. WOW!!!

The only animal in the circus was the dear little spotted pony who gave rides to toddlers around the Ring in the interval. All the risks were taken by the clowns, the strongest man in the world, the girl who put herself into a fourteen inch perspex cube and the man who balanced atop a whole dining-room full of chairs without falling off. I fall off even when I climb on one chair to fix a light bulb.

We walked there and back because parking was a risky option on the ring road. Fine going there; forgot the torch for coming home, but we scuttled along briskly behind the couple in front following their chattering sounds and the faint glimmer of his pale slacks in the total darkness. Gosh! we are such urban folk, expecting street lighting everywhere.

Cheers Gillian