That 70s feeling

Ah, I could almost be back in 1975, at the Hoppings with my family, enjoying candy floss and dodgems and the helter skelter...

Except that <noise of needle scraping over record> I don't like fairs. I was never allowed candy floss. I was too frightened to go on the helter skelter and was too little for dodgems. In fact, the only time I ever went to the Hoppings I saw the Michelin Man and was so frightened when he came to say hello that I howled for ten minutes until he went away and then (literally) clung to my mam's skirt for the whole rest of the horrendous afternoon.

Fairs in our local town passed me by until, as an older teenager, I would go with friends and we would all hang around sulkily (dressed head to toe in black, of course) refusing to have any kind of fun at all.

So, this weekend the fair came to town. And we headed in. Actually, we headed in twice, once at 11am (though I did try to convince Mr B that the afternoon would be better) and once at 3pm when the fair was, you know, open. And it all came flooding back: the noise, the crowds, the constant smell of doughnuts. Well, I quite like doughnuts, but fairs - no.

The kids, of course, had a mixture of fun and not fun. The crossbow shooting game was fun. The 'Palais de Rire' where you go up and down a building through a maze of hanging things and moving floors was fun up until the point (very high in the air) that Conor lost his nerve and persuaded Katherine they should go back. Of course the only rule in those things is that you can never go back. Especially not down the resolutely upward moving weird wobbly staircase. In the end Mr B had to go in and chase them out the right door, although I think by the time he reached them I had managed to convince Katherine with sign language that you didn't have to go down the huge twisty slide and there were stairs at the back. Our family humiliation was complete when both children got stuck in the spinning metal washing machine tube on the way out.

They made up for it by posing admirably with the candy floss (regular readers will know that by family agreement I don't post pictures of the kids, but I have special permission for this one) and by both proving to be crack shots on the air pistol shooting range. Conor's prize was a gun, which I presumed was some kind of kiddy replica until I read the small print and realised it is in fact a proper air pistol, not for use by anyone under 18... (Are they allowed to just give those things away?)

So now here I am, a parent who doesn't really approve of kids playing with guns, and Conor chose them for all his prizes today - so we have four new guns in the house, one of which could actually do some damage. (It occurs to me that my antipathy to the children/gun mix may come from my brother shooting me repeatedly in the bum with an air pistol when I was 7 as I ran away screaming "I'm telling Mam".)

You were going to have a shot of lunch: figs with blue cheese, ham and honey, but they didn't look great in the photos, so I'll save that for another day.