I
diots On Unicycles @B
ritish Unicycle Convention 6th
An IOU outing not to forget, the 6th BUC indeed, but the 1st IOU attendance to such an event......
Simon, the only "Idiot" who went to the event reports (What happened to the others you exclaim ! -1 in Belgium, 1 in New Zealand, 1@work, 2 in the air, 1 up a hill ?)
Well I got there rather later than planned, despite having set off at 2pm my new sportsmobile didn't get me anywhere faster than my old car would have. Five and a half hours later after answering ISDN queries in traffic jams I arrived at the Clocktower, Mostyn, Flintshire, North Wales, UK.
It wasn't quite was I was expecting straight away, I had Mostyn down as a quiant welsh village - the kind you'd find more in land, but still that wasn't the important part. The important part is the Clocktower - or performing arts center is a wonderful clean place with all the facilities for such an event. A hall a canteen, and some rather seemily new nice dorms with afterburner shower devices. The camping wasn't the best so the campers said, but hey, you're a camper !
So I turned up at about 7.30 and had some nosh, and chatted to uni people both old and new, then we went off on the "pub crawl", what a great idea. Not a helmet in sight, about half of us with lights set off on the main road towards the swan pub(?), 200 yds down the road we take a steep uphill, and I mean steep, to cut a long story short we got kind of lost ending up in a dead end, then followed by a completely pitch black section with no streetlamps. We all congregated on the corner of a bend debating which direction to take occasionally avoiding traffic. We split into two groups, one going back and the main going for down in the vain hope that if it was the wrong way we would find pub no.2 if not pub no.1. Luckily we found pub no.1, we stood outside drinking in the fine air. The locals neither jumped up and down in anger nor in joy, they just deliberated on 1) What we were riding 2) Our general sanity. The breakaway group joined us shortly with the walkers. We had a drink. We then set off to pub no.2 which was a bit more rowdy.... The locals where slightly younger and more drunk and took the p***. This was soon overtaken by the sudden urge to want to ride a unicycle. Fulled by only larger about 4 of them had rough goes on our faithful riding machines. One guy took a good slam on his back. It kept both them and us entertained.
After that we got back to the center to meet just about everyone, none pub dwellers inclusive.... There was a flurry of activity in the hall as it approached midnight and people were doing "stuff". What stuff ? Just things, it was (to me) a most interesting atmosphere, like a whole hoard of kids who hadn't had the opportunity to play for a month let loose in the playground. People jumping, crashing, racing, hoping, spinning of all ages on all unis - the unicycle became the 'drug' and everyone was on it - appart from the jugglers - I'm afraid to say I didn't take a picture, I was too busy having fun. This went on and on to the sounds of the chemical brothers coming out of the sound system. It all stopped around 2am.
The following morn we all got up eventually up and had some breakfast. This was followed by Roger's warm up session, which involved racing around the hall in different patterns, going back and forth the length of the hall all joined up.
Yes, the figure of eight, and interesting formation, we must all be very skillful since there weren't any insurance claims !!
