So I’ve almost finished my first OU course. What a saga it’s been, mainly because I’ve been learning subjects that I’ve no real interest in. It makes it a lot harder to write an essay about something when you couldn’t care less about the subject matter.
Anyway, after going to an event at the OU in Cardiff on Thursday, I decided to change my major, from English Literature and Language, to just Literature. Which is good news, as it means the two courses I’ve signed up for next still count, but I can do level one and level two creative writing. If I want to be a writer, it helps to study the subject matter.
Anyway, it looks as thought I’ll pass this course averaging a C, which given that I’ve not studied for about fourteen years, is not all that bad. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep the level of achievement up throughout and I’ll be aiming for a 2.1, which I think is pretty good.
So after years of never having been, I finally went to the Bristol Balloon Fiesta on Saturday. We had friends down for the weekend and too the chance to go and see the festivities. We particularly wanted to see the night glow.
We stopped for a bite to eat in Bristol before making our way over to Ashton Court. It took us an hour to do about three miles. We’d paid for a parking ticket in advance so we could get in easier, only it wasn’t that easy. The sign-posts to the gate were terrible, and we managed to miss the entrance twice as a result. When we finally got in, we had our first run in with the less than useless marshalls. They didn’t do anything, resulting in us having to stop and ask where we were supposed to go.
When we did finally get in, we had about an hour and a half to wait until the night glow. So we wandered around for a bit. I managed to bump into a school friend I hadn’t seen in about 15 years, which was quite strange. It’s funny who you see at these places.
Anyway, the night glow was pretty spectacular, even if we didn’t get to see that much of it due to being so far away from the fence, and there not being a very good vantage point to see everything. It was late starting, but hey, it was worth it in the end. The twenty minutes of fireworks, were more like ten minutes, and they weren’t that spectacular. Still it was an OK evening.
The problem came when we went to leave. I won’t bore you with all the details, but we had a marshall next to us that stood talking to friends for a good forty minutes while everyone struggled and failed to get out of the car park. We got abuse from another marshall when we were sent up the other end of the car park to get out as that wasn’t an exit. We spent 90 minutes trying to get out of the car park. There were no marshalls to speak of, there was no information and there were a lot of annoyed and angry festival goers. It was an utter shambles. Won’t be going again, in less they can sort their act out.
Well the news came with a dull thud to the senses. Listening to the radio on the way into work this morning, fighting with a headache and naff weather. John Hughes has died. The man who brought us films like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day off and my fav, Weird Science. Wow.
I don’t think there’s a Hughes film I haven’t seen, even the really bad ones. Although he wasn’t really an active “player” in hollywood any more, there is a sense of loss with him having gone from the world. Such a shame.
