The agony & the ecstasy

This picture just about sums up the family fairground experience I think. It's all here: one child ecstatic while the other teeters on the edge of a nervous breakdown, garish colours, confusion, needless and excessive expenditure... What more could a parent want? I'd like to add that no child was psychologically or physically harmed in the making of this picture. If only I could be certain that were the case...

Christmas in Sheffield

We spent Christmas in Sheffield and had a splendid time hanging out with the in-laws, eating their food, doing our best to empty their wine rack and generally having a self-indulgent time. We had snow on Christmas day, which was a real treat, only slightly marred by the fact that we'd lived through several days of icy, snowy conditions before we travelled up so there was no novelty to it. There are countless (well, 60) festive photos on my Flickr pages but I decided to post this one here precisely because it's not a Christmas picture. We went to a panto at the City Hall on 27/12 (Cinderella, since you're asking) and found a rather incongruous bunch of fairground rides outside, squeezed into a relatively small area. There was a large spinning swinging thing you can't see in this shot that came within just a few feet of the side of the building every time it swung one way, and about the same from some cables when it went the other. I'm sure it was all very safe but it certainly didn't look it...