venta

Just in case anyone's concerned I did not, as threatened in the last post, drown myself at the weekend.

I arrived in Whitby late on Friday night to find other members of my team bursting with plans. They had trawled the charity shops that afternoon, and purchased a variety of ridiculous straw hats and frocks. The idea being that, if we had to take part in a race we were bound to lose, we might as well look like we weren't taking it too seriously. I'd actually had a similar idea, and was planning a morning raid on the seaside tat-shops to acquire water wings, duck rings and any other inflatables not-intended-as-a-life-saving-device. We would go, dressed up to the nines, waving bottles of gin, and take our places in our boat.

Sadly, t'others were also full of bad news: after their shopping spree they'd heard that the boat race was cancelled. The Friendship Rowing Club has suddenly come to their sense and decided that they didn't actually want a bunch of rank amateurs fooling about in their nice, smart boats. They didn't say that, of course, they said something much more formal-sounding about insurance, and the lack thereof for the public. Various people claimed acquaintance with the captain of the rowing club and offered to sort it out, but the word went round during Saturday that the race was definitely off.

Various alternative challenges were discussed with Black Swan - the original favourite being a race in the pedal boats on West Cliff (which I spoiled by pointing out that there weren't any). We suggested various gin-drinking or cake-eating competitions, which they declined on the grounds that we were just playing to our own strenghts. Well... yes.

Since we had such a ludicrous variety of hats, we donned them anyway and at the time the race should have been run, took ourselves to the hallowed environs of Botham's tea-rooms for afternoon tea. Leaving the price-tags clearly visible on the hats, of course, just to show how very classy we are.

Instead, we went out dancing round the pubs with Black Swan on the Saturday night. I took a short video clip of the end of their 2002 competition-winning dance. In the rapper world, this dance is terribly controversial - for part of the time, dancers let go of their swords. This leads to a whole "it's impressive, but is it rapper" debate. It's usually a crowd-pleaser, though.

This is a .MPG file straight from my camera - Winamp plays it fine, other than that I'm afraid you're on your own.

Yes, please, I want to see controversial rapper!

(This link will expire soon, as I don't want a 15Mb download clogging up my webspace. Please download it rather than streaming it, as I still have a relatively low bandwidth limit.).