Shipping Up to Bristol

The roads are a dangerous place, as I found out, secondhand (luckily for me, not the people involved), on a trip to Bristol.  Only a few short minutes after the trip had begun, we noticed that a car was stuck blocking a junction, as it had been unceremoniously shunted all up its behind.  A police car was further blocking the road, lights akimbo, presumably dealing with the situation.  Having passed this makeshift accidental blockade we realised that in fact the situation was not as we had presumed, as the police car was in fact playing the role of the shunter in this particular scenario, sporting heavy damage to its headlights.

I have been told, in regards to matters of the road, that the vehicle that does the rear-ending is always in the wrong.  Always. ALWAYS.  Unfortunately I doubt I will ever know whether or not the police vehicle was in the wrong in this situation, as there are a number of ways this accident could have come to pass.  The police car could have been reacting to an emergency, and the speed of this could have caused the collision, however the likelihood that the police were reacting to anything with haste is unlikely (satire, ba-zing).  The other option is that the driver of the police vehicle was careless and caused the accident out of his own ineptness, and having been the victim of a crime myself and subsequently having dealt with the police first hand I am in no position to comment on whether or not I found the police to be inept.  Another, and less libellous, stance to take is that accidents happen so deal with it, which also allows me to move on nicely to the next section.

Another accident we noticed, this time returning from Bristol, was between a car and a motorcycle.  This one had occurred on the motorway, and as such the accident was of a far worse scale.  Not for this accident was the small braking of the headlights and the bumpers, no, this accident was the harrowing scene of a crumpled windscreen, and a Suzuki rent asunder.  Several meters in front of the remains of the vehicles, which had been moved onto the hard shoulder, was the exploded, inside-out carcass of what must have been the motorcycle driver.  If the motorcycle driver was a hedgehog.  And frankly, if a hedgehog had become so filled with ideas of bipedal grandeur and had commandeered a motorbike then I think he got what he deserved, the reckless knock-off porcupine.  I apologise in advance if any of the family of those involved in the accident are reading this, I know full well that RTA’s are no laughing matter, especially when there are hedgehogs involved.

 

We were shipping up to Bristol in order to acquire some tickets that we had purchased over the internet, from a venue which didn’t post them out which was very inconvenient thanks.  However the resulting day trip we had in order to pick up the tickets was enjoyable, so I suppose I do forgive you (especially bearing in mind we could have picked up the tickets from the box office on the night of the performance, it was almost as though we were looking for an excuse to go on a road trip).  We had very little trouble getting into the city, which was good because having a troublesome journey would have been troubling.  Having parked up all nice, we alighted from the vehicle (a car) and set out in search of the Tobacco Factory.  The main issue I have with the Tobacco Factory as a venue (having never been inside) is that it has situated itself very near to a building which houses Imperial Tobacco, an organisation which does function as a venue for theatre and live comedy, which means that had I actually gone through the second set of doors and asked the employee at reception about the Richard Herring gig she would have been extremely confused and I would have been all embarrassed up.  I appreciate that the Tobacco Factory probably takes its name from what it functioned as before it become a stellar home for live arts events, and it is likely that the presence of a Tobacco company near to this workplace is related to that, but I think they should be shipped apart so that I don’t get into situations of minor inconvenience and embarrassment.  If you could move Imperial Tobacco rather than the Tobacco Factory that would be awesome, as I would then not have to rediscover the location of the venue for which I am looking for, thanks.

 

One of the objectives outlined for me and my chauffeur as we journeyed to Bristol was to get a better grasp of the accent displayed therein, as we righteously enjoy turning our hands, or mouths / vocal folds, to the imitation of other accents.  We were, therefore, slightly surprised, though not in a negative way, to discover very few accents that we could pin down as Bristolean.  In fact, the only two utterances (bar ours) that we heard during our time in Bristol proper were one of a besuited man loudly declaring “Lunch!” as he oozed into his supercool car in what I would describe as 1960s received pronunciation.  Similarly the lady who worked at the box office, where we received our tickets with no problems, spoke with an over-polite RP and an air of incredible enthusiasm.  I cannot be sure whether this is how she always talks (probably not) or whether she realised from my opening gambit that I was from Wales, decided that I was thus a member of Britain’s special needs class and adjusted her tone accordingly.  Either that or she once had an awful run-in with a Richard Herring fan in her past, and ever since she has treated all of his fanbase with a degree of zealous pomp.  The way I just described her sounds pejorative, but I am sure she is a wonderful person really, and I certainly found her train-station-announcement stylings very amusing.

 

Bristol seems to enjoy more than its fair share of joggers, either that or escaping from muggings are taken far more casually there.  I was most struck by the contrast between the people jogging on the side of the road, and the people who could be seen in the parking lot of Cribbs Causeway.  I found myself exclaiming: “Look, there’s Onslow from off’ve the Keeping Up Appearances!” many times, to which my chauffeur eventually took exception to, even though I wasn’t talking about him.

 

Overall, I quite enjoyed Bristol, though I think perhaps I should point out that I do not have a chauffeur - I have a friend who drives, which is essentially the same thing, and neither am I as old as using ‘Onslow’ as a pop-culture reference would suggest.  Also when I first said it out loud I declared that the man in question looked like ‘Oslo’, which is far more of an insult, as while Onslow is a large man, Oslo is (I discovered after some research) the biggest and the Capital city of Norway.  I didn’t mean to describe the unsuspecting shopper as the “fastest-growing Scandinavian capital” (Wikipedia, 2009).  At the very most he was as big as Norrköping.