The best of times …Yeh I know, steady on! Two blogs in a row. It had to happen sometime I guess. I mean, for starters, you have to learn the name of the trolley, right?Yeh. I’m sure you are all agog.That wasn’t the reason it was one of the best weeks ever though. More on that story … later.The Trolley is named!Oh yes he is. Literally tens of people from my enormous crowd of superfans—sorry that’s a lie, there are about 100 and usually only 45 are ever active at any given time—voted to name the trolley. Indeed this time, it broke all records as a princely 47 people voted. Initially, precisely no respondants to the off piste option picked K’Barthan names, until I changed it from ‘Wait! I have a better idea’ to ‘Hang on the character name I choose isn’t listed’ or some such. Then one did.The vote came down to Humbert, Psycho Dave or Trev with Gladys a short distance behind these three but the winner was … drum roll please… PSYCHO DAVE.So Psycho Dave and I went to the Foreward Festival yesterday. It was quiet but good fun and I did make back the price of the pitch and the petrol, so that’s grand.
Fiddler on the roofAs I may have mentioned, Gareth Davies, who is the ludicrously talented geezer who voices all the K’Barthan audiobooks, is in Fiddler on the Roof which is touring all over the UK until mid January 2026. I am not a big musical theatre person on the whole, I dunno why because I do enjoy opera, but I wanted to go support Gareth doing his thing so I grabbed a matinee ticket for Wednesday and my mate Jill and I made a day of it and went to Norwich. Jill and I trained it the entire way which takes an hour and involves the most ridiculously enormous flights of stairs to cross any railway, anywhere, that I think I’ve seen.Jill and I are a bit crook. She has two shit knees and I have one so we are, kind of, the halt and the lame. The allocated time to change trains is 6 minutes but you have to get out go into the car park and follow a winding route between two big metal fences go over the footbridge and then follow a similarly circuitous winding route round the carpark and back into the station the other side. It was touch and go as I’m not great on stairs but I do have one functioning knee while Jill doesn’t.
The stairs of doom
By managing to position ourselves in the carriage opposite the exit we were able to avoid walking any distance along the platform, which, due to our dot and carry one status, would have rendered the change impossible.Having contended with this, we wandered round Norwich shopping, grabbed salads from M&S which we ate sitting in a church yard and then off we went.Now, Fiddler on the roof is about pogroms, so I was worried it would be incredibly depressing. I remembered watching it as a kid on film and pretty much wanting to top myself afterwards. This production is very well reviewed so I hoped it wouldn’t have quite the same effect but, holy shit, I was not prepared for how excellent it was. I was blown away.One of the cleverest touches was that they made the fiddler a character and put him on stage, which was genius. For all those long and rather lovely rambling instrumental bits. As someone who was, at one point, not too shabby at the violin, I was gobsmacked as he played all sorts of mad up and down stuff in 5th position, while in character, moving about the stage and at one notable point while lying on a table pretending to be drunk. The clarinettest also appeared on stage and kind of duelled with him at some points.The singing was epic, the dancing and the choreography clever and original.All I remembered from seeing it on telly as a nipper was the song ‘If I Were a Rich Man’ but I’d not realised how witty the script is or how many gorgeous melodies are involved. In one song, ‘They Grow Up So Fast,’ I found myself getting a bit teary.It stands or falls on the main character, Tevye, who is on stage throughout pretty much. The second act is where it all starts to go a bit horribly wrong, but at the end, what was in many respects an incredibly sad outcome somehow became uplifting as you imagined everyone going on to make a new life in countries where they were able to do other jobs than peasant labour. I came out feeling uplifted rather than flat and if you feel like giving it a go would hugely recommend it.Afterwards we met Gareth for a drink and did this selfie, obvs. He’s second understudy for Tevye but the first only joined the cast recently and hasn’t rehearsed it yet. We discovered that the guy who plays Tevye had the day off the next day and Gareth was doing it. I was a bit gutted to miss that but was still chuffed to see he had plenty of bits to say and sing anyway in the part of Avram. So yeh, that was grand.
All in all a bloody good day. It was lovely to meet Gareth who was, surprisingly, exactly the way I expected him to be. And at least the reason I couldn’t make Thursday’s show was a good one.One of the best days ever.The next day, we went on a family trip to Duxford. McOther was a star during the whole looking after parents thing. Both the McOther’s were, but especially the husband-shaped one. So I decided he deserved a treat. I’ve always had to borrow the money from him to buy him anything nice for his birthday or Christmas, and since I’ve inherited half the price of the house and I’ve never had money before—and probably won’t again at this rate—I decided to buy him a really ritzy present.A flight in a WW2 plane.Having seen on TV that you could buy spitfire flights at Biggin Hill I had a look to see how much they cost. It was quite a lot for 20 minutes but would be worth it, I decided.
However, ever cautious (polite speak for a bit miserly) I decided to google flights and see how much they cost. Also, if Duxford did them, it was only 40 minutes down the A11 so it seemed a much better plan to go there.When I started investigating prices, I discovered that Duxford was half the price of the others and that, for the same price the others charged, they would actually involve another aeroplane and do a fake dog fight—or formation flight, depending on the stomach strength of the passenger. The opposing aeroplane was the main fighter of Germany, an ME109 or at least the nearest thing there is left, a Spanish one, but it had seen action in the Battle of Britain.Originally, I decided I wouldn’t tell McOther but then I realised he’s on beta blockers and that I might need to. I dropped a few hints and he told me he wouldn’t, under any circumstances, do a skydive. So then I thought I’d better check if he was on for a Spitfire flight, there being no option to fly in a Mosquito or a ME109.
Further thought about his hectic schedule—he is retired but the board positions he took which he hoped would be straightforward and just keep the cash coming in are actually not, and he’s been doing far to much real work for his liking—I had to ask him what day he could go and ended up having to tell him.So we went to Duxford and enjoyed a pootle round the museum with free entry. Then we went to Duxford Flying Experiences to check in. McOther went for his briefing and McMini and I were escorted to a garden, with a small air conditioned summerhouse. It was right on the apron and the double bubble spitfire was parked about 3 metres from the fence one side, with the world’s only double hurricane 3 metres or so from the fence the other. Just behind the hurricane was the Bouchon/ME109.Woah. History nerd 101.We sat in the warm sun, ate free cake and strawberries and watched the planes. It was busy and to my joy my favourite plane ever, the Catalina PBY5A flying boat, was doing shareholder flights; loads of them. So I got a specialtastic little present from the fates; to see my favourite plane up close too. It’s the only one flying in Europe, I believe, so extra cool points. It’s also the ship in the next non-K’Barthan thing I’m writing.
There was one other family doing a flight that day and they were lovely, which made the experience all the better. They were booked at 2.00 so we got to see what was involved, which was good. Afterwards the pilot came out and had a chat with us. We were also introduced to the guy flying the ME109. They were both very amusing, with very dry pilot senses of humour.Then it was McOther’s go. They strapped him in. I took loads of video and photos and off they went. They provided us with two videos, one of McOther’s face throughout the flight and one from the tail of the plane. We were also shown a tracking site for planes so we were able to trace the journey in real time. It looked like a tangle of coloured wool.
One of the most amusing things was the reaction of the pilots when they returned. The one flying the spitfire got out and I asked him how it had gone.‘He was amazing!’ he said. ‘He let me do everything.’McOther confirmed that yes, there had been realistic rolls, some time spent upside down etc. We took pictures of the planes, pictures of ourselves by the planes, and also the hurricane because … well … you have to.The chap flying the ME109 also appeared to have enjoyed himself enormously. Although he possibly had a bit of an itch left to scratch because, as we left the musum at six o’clock to go home, someone was throwing the ME109 round the sky in spectacular loops, turns and barrel rolls. He also had very amusing ME109 socks with yellow bits.
All in all it was a fabulous day, not just because McOther enjoyed his present, but also because as massive history nerds, merely sitting in our special garden on the apron watching the planes all afternoon was absolutely brilliant for Mc(not so)Mini and I. So we all had a fantastic time. One of the best days ever.
