Double Pup, Refreshes Your Days, Naturally!

[lupestripe]

The York Meet on Saturday was great fun - it was the first main meet I had attended in the city for a while but I'm glad I did. The venue, Varsity, is effectively a nightclub which they open for us during the day. Consequently the toilets are pretty grotty, with the poo cubicle lot in red light which is pretty useless for wiping purposes, but for what it lacks in amenities it makes up for in privacy (we were the only ones there) and excellent hot chocolates and coffees (if you are into that sort of thing). You had to get them from the cafe next door but it was good to have a non-alcohol meet, particularly as it kept costs down.

Keeping costs down, we also drove over, even though York Council has drastically increased parking charges over the last couple of years. We tried the station, where the short stay was £10 per hour before going to the long stay where it was £7 for the day. That was far more reasonable.

The Fursuit walk around York was good although being half-term, the city was crowded. I frequently got detached from the group, largely due to my antics with people and my desire to visit as many shops as possible. One of them, a fashion shop specializing in ties, was run by Oracle's mother so he has a nice amount of explaining to do. I also terrorized a seller of candles which looked like licquorice all sorts (the bobbly ones), danced with a Jamaican reggae band and went to an ambulance to claim I had been turned into a dog. For many, the walk was too long but for me it was not long enough, even though it touched nearly two hours.

On Sunday, it was the annual Bark In The Park event, where we Fursuit for a local hospice. There were two venues this year - Golden Acre Park and Temple Newsam - so logistics were more challenging. We needed two lots of two dog suiters at both venues necessitating Wolfie wearing one of my dog mascot suits to accompany Sval and me and Arcais suiting at Golden Acre. Being a sponsored dog walk, there were many dogs there and they reacted perplexed by the fursuits Some, mainly the bigger breeds, were scared, or asserting their territorial dominance, by barking at us while the smaller ones were generally more friendly although confused why these dogs smelled of humans. Our job was to direct the walkers and it went very well, although we could have done without the 8am start.

For lunch, we decamped to a local carvery where we had cheap food before some of is arranged to reconvene at our house later in the afternoon. We ended up watching the Tim Vine fronted Whittle (put on your Whittle masks) on Challenge before catching Anneka Rice's bum in Treasure Hunt. Through the miracle of Google, I found out that this episode was from the first series and broadcast on 3 February 1983, just a handful of weeks after I was born. The technology looks so primitive by today's standards and the Internet will have changed so much about the research side of the show, but it was still amazing to think how much was spent on this show by a fledgling Channel 4 - hiring two helicopters for an 11-show run, some abroad, couldn't have been cheap.

After this, we saw Despicable Me 2, perhaps more puerile than the original but a good film nonetheless plus the increased minion antics was always going to please. And then we flopped - two days of fursuiting is absolutely knackering so we just vegged afterwards after a great weekend.

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

So there's a choice of £10 per hour, or £7 per day? Alll-righty then! ^_^; (Not a concern I usually have to deal with, though. Just as well - parking a train would be a real pain)

An 8am start? On a Sunday? O.o; Positively dastardly!

Egh, how good C4 was, early on! Some fun programming like that, alongside other gems like Equinox (dammit, we need more science on TV! Let's see the return of Tomorrow's World, and the elevation of Horizon back up a couple notches, rather than the currently dumbed-down US-coproductions), and film seasons like Tarkovsky. =:D Now, they only seem interested in the likes of Big Brother and the abhorrent Benefits Street.

Mm, Despicable Me 2 was pretty okay. ^_^ Perfectly enjoyable, but didn't seem to have the punch of the original. Moreso, even, with Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs - the first was pretty sharp, whilst the sequel felt rather.. going through the motions. =:/

I wonder what the local buns would make of me photographing them in leporine form. =:D (Or maybe equine? They seem quite untroubled by horses, unless they get a bit worryingly close, which is entirely understandable)

[enteirah]

Vanity rather than Varsity. Though the latter isn't amazing either ;) It was a good weekend though, and thanks for having me round again. And for introducing me to that pub which we have to go back to at some point so I can get a huge square burger... >.>

As for vast sums of money that were doubtless spent on Treasure Hunt at the time, I suppose a lot of it just has to do with how different the whole broadcast scene was in the early 80s as I think I said at the time. Channel 4 was entirely funded by the ITV companies then, so any and all ad revenue went back to the regional area it was broadcasting in. As the only 2 commercial channels in the UK were both owned by the same companies (who weren't short of a few bob, especially in the South), they were going to get 100% of any potential ad revenue whatever happened with the show, so they could throw money at a lot of things. Govt regulation also prevented them from throwing any big prizes out till well into the 90s, so more money could be spent on everything else. There'd be almost zero chance of seeing such gambles now, hence why it usually has to be a guaranteed format bought in from elsewhere, or something ultimately low risk (usually a gameshow where there's a 'potential' big prize, but it's so very rarely given out).

I've just remembered I never sorted out my York photos too. I'll probably have to do this after Nordic now.