Author: jane

It’s the run up to Christmas, and so on Saturday we headed off to the Cite Europe shopping centre in Calais to stock up on cheaper booze (with hundreds of other brits judging by how busy the place was).

We used the Eurotunnel again, and again were impressed with it. The fact that it is less than 5 minutes from the terminal to Cite Europe is pretty handy too and even the return trip only took us about 20 minutes (although you do wonder where they’re taking you as you can see the terminal from the East Car Park).

We bought most of our alcohol from Tesco – using the Superplonk data to work out what the best deals were. We managed to track down enough to keep us going for a while anyways. One thing we noticed was that Tesco’s do an ordering service – we might give that a try next time.

We stopped for lunch in Le Moulin a Biere (getting 10% off because we’d been to Tescos) and then had a good wander around the rest of the shops, and finished off in Carrefour buying some cheese, and a few more bottles of wine.

We went to a lecture about the history of the West Pier last night which was very interesting. Jackie Marsh-Hobbs has a great selection of photos from its past (She is willing to do these talks for free to interested groups). I learnt quite a lot about the West Pier, and piers in general including that they used to do Bicycle diving from it (until someone died), it had mines put on it and all along the beach during the Second World War and it had a rifle range which used live ammunition. We bought a copy of Walking on Water by Fred Gray to learn more about the historical story of this once beautiful structure.

One of my regrets about the West Pier was that the first summer we lived in Brighton, they did the last hard hat tours of it for £10. That would have been quite an experience, but as with a lot of things we put it on the “we’ll do it next year” list.

The Brighton Film Festival starts on Friday with a showing of Vera Drake at the UGC in the Marina. Some interesting looking films amongst the selection.

We headed over to Lewes for the Bonfire celebrations on Friday – it was a pretty chilly night but we stuck around long enough to watch the processions before heading home to warm up with a lovely pecan pie treat. I took some photos, but at the moment they’re still in a processing queue – so, if you want to see what its all about there are photos for 2003, 2002 and 2001.

We headed along to the Brighton Bloggers meet up last night and caught up with Jeremy, Jonathan and Andrew. Jeremy and his band Salter Cane were playing at the Hanbury Ballroom as part of Brighton Live week.

It was a free event organised by the Gilded Palace of Sin and was a really good evening. The first band on were Homescience – “An unashamed pop band of maximum jangle”, the second were Threewheeler – “a quartet making a totally unorthodox, utterly unique music” and finishing with Salter Cane – “an amalgam of NICK CAVE in gospel mode, WILLARD GRANT CONSPIRACY at their most dramatic, SIXTEEN HORSEPOWER’s lyrical darkness and the heaviness of JOY DIVISION”.

It seems that there won’t be any European Brighton Bears games this season after a sponsor pulled out. Shame, I was looking forward to the odd Tuesday evening euro league match.

We went to see the Bears v Sharks match the other weekend at the Triangle, taking our 8 year old nephew with us – he seemed to really enjoy the whole occasion, so I suspect we’ll end up taking him to another game this season.

We went to see the Perrier Comedy Awards show in Brighton last night. It was compared by Adam Hills, and starred Will Hodgson (winner of the 2004 Best newcomer), Sarah Kendall (a nominee), Jackson’s Way (winner of the 2004 Perrier Comedy Award) and finished off with non-perrier nominee Marcus Brigstocke (who was filling in for Reginald D Hunter).

Jackson’s Way and Marcus Brigstocke were excellent, the other two didn’t seem to have the experience to cope with a gig in the Brighton Dome in front of 1000 people. Yet again, I found myself leaving a comedy show feeling that I don’t see half as much live comedy as I should.

Persuading people to vote seems to be a big thing in the US at the moment. First Michael Moore does his noodles for votes offer, and now votergasm are using sex pledges to boost voter turnout among young people, as well as promoting safe, consensual sex.

Last night we went to the Brighton Cafe Scientifique at Terraces Bar and Grill. Simon Singh was the guest speaker, all about the Big Bang. Despite there being a lot of people there, and the acoustics/lack of microphone making it hard to hear at times it was a very good talk, explaining the facts and theories in a really accessible manner – the way I wish I’d been taught science at school (rather than my physics teacher at senior school announcing that “as far as I’m concerned women are only here to give pleasure to me and give birth to my children and I don’t see why I should teach them physics”).

BBC News have their Photographer of the Year: The Final going on at the moment. They received over 30,000 entries and there are now just 12 to vote on.