Fairground Dutch Courage

I’ve re-used the middle one of the aerial photos I posted with the waffle about Lille Citadel to point you at the large, sandy-looking area to the East side of it. This is the Champs de Mars. For most of the year, the big bare bit serves a car park for visitors to the Citadel, the zoo (marked by the lower of the 2 blue markers on the photo and where our white-handed gibbons hang out), the sports facilities, the canals, the Bois de Boulogne (generic name for all the woods around the Citadel), the kids’ playgrounds and anyone who likes doing the park and ride routine to avoid the narrowness of Vieux Lille’s streets and the dearth of street parking. As you can see, the whole thing represents a really top facility to have outside my kitchen window.

As I’ve suggested before, I’m determined to take greater advantage of my position and general situation this year than I did in 2006. I think a bike would be a very good start but I haven’t yet decided whether that bike will be powered or not. Maybe I’ll get one of each. I was in a supermarket one lunchtime this week and saw nice-looking mountain bikes with heaps of gears and front shock absorbers for €75, that's 50 quid, give or take a bit. Pretty Incredible. Chuck in the (very) necessary locks, a pump, a bottle and some groin-protective shorts and the whole thing could easily be up and running for about £90. Practically free when you look at where it could take me from here. As for the motorised version, I’ve done plenty of that sort of thing in the past so no fears there. I can ride up to 125cc machines on my car licence and, as I’m not a speed freak, that’ll do for the moment. I’ve got a back courtyard where either or both could live without their being in anyone’s way so it’s really just up to me what I fancy getting. Financially speaking, I’ve seen brand new Vespa-style scooters, again in the supermarkets, for €950 but I’ve never really been the scooter type. If I buy, I’ll go for a second hand trail bike. I was pointed towards a real beauty that was being sold by someone at work a few months back but it was just a bit too pricy for me at the time.

From time to time, coinciding with certain school holidays and other festivals, the fairground comes along and, depending on which fairground we get, it can be quite fun for an afternoon or an exhilarating midnight addition to a night out.

If it’s the kids’ version, it only covers about a quarter of the Champs de Mars. It’s inevitably a bit tame but, for someone’s who’s as handy with an air rifle as I am, the chances of winning a teddy are disproportionately high ;o). As a non-parent, it’s also fairly nice to see excited little bods enjoying daft little activities. Not something I normally encounter. As a general rule and a veritable bonus, these fairs are too child-oriented to attract the yobs who inevitably hang around in and spoil the more grown-up versions. I hate yobs.

As for the grown up versions of fairs which arrive from time to time, they occupy the whole of the Champs and some of the rides are enormous. I’ve never been a huge fan of being scared shitless in the name of entertainment and, even if I’m occasionally tempted to have a go on a serious-looking ride, I tend to favour the ones which were built some time ago and have since stayed where they were built, proving their structural integrity time and time again (and available for official safety inspection at any time) as opposed to the ones which are thrown together in a day, used for a week or two and are then pulled down, packed away, hauled away and thrown back up somewhere else. When you see a guy with a spanner in his back pocket and his knuckles and bottom lip scrape along the ground as he walks, it hardly inspires confidence that the ride has been assembled to exacting standards by diligent and skilled artisans.

The only times I’ve been on any of these rides (something akin to the one pictured) have been when I’ve been walking home from some bar or other on a Saturday night at midnight or thereabouts and I’ve been attracted, like a moth, to the flashing lights of the fair, more or less visible from my outside my front door so impossible to miss as I approach the apartment. “I’ll just pop along and watch a few people dangling upside down 100m up in the air, doing their best to retain their bodily contents”…… or that’s the idea. Then, of course, Dutch Courage kicks in.

Fairground Dutch Courage is different from the kind that empowers you to cross a bar to talk to some girl you’ve never seen before. In those cases, it stays with you throughout the conversation and beyond, whatever the outcome of the approach. Fairground Dutch Courage is peculiar in that it reacts to the sound of the restraining bar snapping into place over your shoulders to clamp you into your seat. It reacts by leaving your body completely, never to return…… so there I’d be, dangling upside down 100m up in the air, doing my best to retain my bodily contents.

On one occasion, I knew I’d heard a distant clang on the ground, 100m “above my head” but I just imagined it to have been someone’s 50 cents following the traditions of gravity. I was extremely lucky. After I got back down again and was ready to walk away, I decided to hang around and watch the next batch of riders on what I’d just escaped from. About 5 minutes into watching it, wondering what the Hell had possessed me to go on the ride (realising “Stella”, of course), I was tapped on the shoulder and was handed my house keys by one of the “artisans”. The distant clang explained. If I’d walked off straight away after the ride, that would have been a long, cold night and a challenging Sunday, trying to find a way to contact the property agents to get hold of some spare keys. Maybe this particular artisan has as good an eye for detail and diligence in his engineering as he obviously has a good eye for faces.

I hope so as, inevitably, there I’ll be, some weeks or months from now, dangling upside down 100m up in the air, doing my best to retain……

When the large fair is there, as I lie in bed with the window open as usual, all I can hear is screaming in the distance. Just like being back in Leeds ;o)