{"id":3510,"date":"2013-03-01T15:43:14","date_gmt":"2013-03-01T15:43:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnshepherd.me.uk\/?p=3510"},"modified":"2013-03-10T15:43:42","modified_gmt":"2013-03-10T15:43:42","slug":"february-travels-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnshepherd.me.uk\/?p=3510","title":{"rendered":"February Travels"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Pancake day.<\/strong> <\/p>\n<p>We stayed a bit closer to home for Shrove Tuesday this year. In previous years we&#8217;ve travelled the country in search of mass-participation football games and world-class pancake races. This year we just popped down to Scarborough for the day, where they have an odd Pancake bell-ringing ceremony followed by mass participation&#8230; skipping. <\/p>\n<p>Skipping? <\/p>\n<p>Yep, skipping. Apparently skipping used to be a traditional thing to do on pancake day, and in Scarborough they still give the kids the day off school, close the (usually busy) seafront road, and everybody goes skipping. I was a bit surprised by how popular the event was&#8230; I mean, if *I* was given the afternoon off school at that age, I expect I&#8217;d just sit at home reading comics and playing spectrum games. So it&#8217;s good to see the custom perpetuated&#8230; and <em>mostly,<\/em> it would seem, without the need for adults to goad the kids into doing it.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"400\" height=\"225\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/GRJLOpgZDQ0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Chinese New Year.<\/strong> <\/p>\n<p>OK&#8230; not a major excursion, since all it involved was a quick drive into Newcastle city centre, but I made a video so it still counts! I&#8217;m slightly annoyed with myself here&#8230; the main dragon dance has got so busy in recent years that it&#8217;s virtually impossible to see clearly from the crowd, so I took my monopod to use as an overhead camera boom. I lugged the thing all the way to Stowell Street, started setting up, then realised I&#8217;d left the all-important connector plate at home and couldn&#8217;t fix the camera on top&#8230; doh! &#8230; so this footage was mostly taken at arms length&#8230; with lots of post-production de-wobblification involved.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"400\" height=\"225\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/J8O09WFsVFg\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve been to a few of these; there&#8217;s a really good carnival atmosphere, and lots of street-food on offer. My top tip: when you get hungry, ignore the restaurants and go to the Chinese Association building, half way down Stowell street &#8212; they do a *delicious* noodle stir-fry on the day; big portions for just a couple of quid; we&#8217;ve gone there for a couple of years now, and been impressed both times. Plus, it&#8217;s likely that a lion dancing team or two will turn up while you&#8217;re eating&#8230; as shown at 1:55-ish in the video.<\/p>\n<p>While watching the lion dancers this year, it occurred to me that the whole idea of monsters dancing on your doorstep to let in the new year has an <em>awful<\/em> lot of similarities to the Mari Lwyd ceremony that they do in south Wales. I wonder if there&#8217;s some obscure historic connection. Or just some deep-rooted idea in the human psyche about spectral beasties on your dooorstep heralding a new era.<\/p>\n<p>Finally&#8230; the end of the month saw us visiting Slaithwate, West Yorkshire, for their biennial <strong>Moonraking festival <\/strong>&#8230; in which the villagers &#8220;capture&#8221; the moon, parade it around the village for a couple of hours, and then put it back in the sky. As you do.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"400\" height=\"225\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/JOQiaXjaAl0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>It was a fun event, and a lot more elaborate\/artsy than I was expecting, with some cool mutli-media thingies going on. Check out the &#8220;moth globe&#8221; at 1:50 &#8212; the faces on this (and other animations) were collected from spectators, via a webcam. Neat idea. Surprisingly effective firework show at the end of the event too &#8212; lovely use of silver mortars! I *do* like a fireworks show where a bit of thought has gone into things, rather than just seeing how much pyro you can get into the sky in the minimum time possible \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Pancake day. We stayed a bit closer to home for Shrove Tuesday this year. In previous years we&#8217;ve travelled the country in search of mass-participation football games and world-class pancake races. This year we just popped down to Scarborough for &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/johnshepherd.me.uk\/?p=3510\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,49,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-calendar-customs","category-travels","category-video","tumblog-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnshepherd.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnshepherd.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnshepherd.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnshepherd.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnshepherd.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3510"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/johnshepherd.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3525,"href":"https:\/\/johnshepherd.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3510\/revisions\/3525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnshepherd.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnshepherd.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnshepherd.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}