Bristol

This weekend was a most interesting weekend, full of fun, culture and family. It began several months earlier when we were working out dates for our cousins to meet up. We set this weekend and a good job we did. The weekend started off for me driving to Swindon to pick up my brother Steve from the train station. Note: Aylesbury Road by Swindon train station, or No. 11 if you are counting. The soundtrack was courtesy of Pete Tong, radio 1, ‘starting the weekend’, a good clear journey.

Steve was let down by the trains and arrived an hour late.

We set off for Bristol and arrived within the hour at cousin Mary’s house, chilled out and had a beer. Cousin Paul joined us from Brighton and the party was complete, the weekend could begin.
Next morning, we legged it across town to the Bristol Museum to see banksy v.s. Bristol Museum. Banksy is a graffiti artist who delivers high quality graffiti to middle class people. A lot of the art is subversive in a delicate way, not too offensive or challenging and clever in a simple way. So walking around the exhibition is like going to see a stand up comedian whose act is a series of gags; There are lots of small jokes, they make you chuckle, you have got the point of the art, then you move on, it doesn’t test you too much and you don’t need an art degree to understand it. Because of this reason, plus banksy is famously notorious, and mainly the exhibition is free, we queued for a bit to get in.
Highlights of the exhibition for me was the girl in the blow up bullet proof jacket, as it showed genuine vulnerability emphasised by the stylized abstraction of the stencilling. Also the virtues were very good, hedonism and consumerism were put on plinths ready to join justice, prudence, fate and temperance.





Both were of course plaster and plastic, not set in the stone of the others. The best bit of the exhibition was the fact that people had to go in search of other banksy works in the rest of the museum, giving people a chance to see some of the other marvellous exhibits and be surprised and enriched at what they saw. So as a typical middle class person into pop culture and stand up comedy, I loved it.
Pop culture makes you hungry so we headed to a Moroccan stall in Bristol’s covered market and had a good lunch of Moroccan lamb and couscous. I hope this stall recognises its success in recreating the Moroccan street market feel and doesn’t go up market to a building and a restaurant, it would be a shame, losing some of the experience of eating in a market stall in Bristol. Suitably nourished, we headed over to St Pauls and the street carnival there.
I didn’t know what to expect from this carnival, never having heard of it before the Friday night. It was brilliant. The music was fantastic and the floats and procession was great, it really matched the weather and everyone was there for fun. We watched the parade of the various groups, taking in the various cultures and tapping our feet to the music, then set off for the centre stage and soaked up the sun, Red Stripe, music and rum punches.
Round dinner time we were feeling peckish so headed home had a shower some pasta and went out again to the Apple, a cider bar on the Severn, a great place. Good ciders, can’t remember what the perry I was drinking was, but it was good. We finished the evening with some cake I had made, which went down well.
After a great night we had a lie in and woke up round 9:30, got up and headed to the home of Champion the Wonder Horse, Weston Super Mare. It was a long and circuitous route through various jolly industrial estates and wonderfully landscaped retail parks to the sea front, which turned out to be not much better. We had a look at the sea, miles out, stuck in the usual place, above the land and below the sky, a view that is often described when a tsunami is imminent. Children were rooting around in the mud, much like peasants from medieval times.
There was a sand sculpture exhibition on the beach which was stingy as students did not count as concessions. So we regrettably paid full price, determined to maintain the high cultural level we had established the previous day despite the council’s disregard to the state of student finances. If anyone asks how to attract a younger audience to ‘traditional’, read ‘generally rubbish’ seaside towns, mention making it cheaper for students who don’t have budgets to go abroad or go on fancy holidays. It was a good display of sculpture and some clever sand works, including a cascade of rays and a detailed inside of a sub.
We considered playing crazy golf, but the onset of rain would have meant that it would have been more than crazy to play to play golf, more like insane or psychotic golf, so we gave up on that idea and left. Clearly from our experience, ‘super’ is an ironic name, like ‘Great’ Yarmouth. We looked at a map and found out a much quicker route than the sign posts directed. I recommend you do the same incase you find yourself in Weston super mare and need an escape route, perhaps when a tsunami eventually arrives.
We got back to Mary’s and got a BBQ going. Unfortunately the rain had followed us there and we managed to get the cooking done on the fire, but had to eat inside.
After lunch we packed up and got moving ready to get home and ready for work. I had one obvious detour to conduct, and just down the road in Bedminster is a circle of fun, Aylesbury Road and Aylesbury Crescent.

My brother’s second and third Aylesburys, wow three in a weekend, I don’t know how he handled it but he managed to suitably contain his excitement. The streets are quite well kept and have some really nice houses on. I think they were 1930’s housing and apart from the skips up and down the street and the messy builders house on the corner, it was a good road.

We set off for Swindon to drop Steve off, then Reading, as once again the railways let him down, then home accompanied by the end of the Men’s Tennis Wimbledon Final. A great weekend, thanks Mary, Paul and Steve. We will have to do it again sometime.