h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Saturday morning involved me going to parkrun as normal – but unusually I didn't run! Since my 250th run I've decided to try and undertake every volunteer role, so this week I volunteered to be Funnel Manager. The Finish Funnel is where runners finish the run – their race ends where they enter the funnel, which is where the timers are, and the funnels keeps people in order until they collect their finish token, which is in order. They then take the finish token and their own barcode to the scanners, which links who finished in which place and this is combined with the timers that have recorded that person 1 finished in such a time, so that when it is all fed into the computer it combines the times with the people so everyone gets their time.
The Funnel Manager's role is to ensure that everyone stays in line and in order in the Finish Funnel, prevent Funnel Ducking (entering the funnel and leaving the sides, which mucks up the order between the timers and the finish tokens), that people don't hang around the funnel's exit and other potential blockages in the finish funnel to prevent the queue backing up, ensuring people finish properly, as well as ensuring that the timekeepers and tokens positions match. The good thing about the course being muddy is that it really spreads the runners out, so we didn't have coachloads of people arriving at once, and we only had around 250-260 runners this week. It worked out okay and I managed to spot one woman who only ran one and a half laps of the 3-lap course, which is cheating.

It was also the day of the Christmas Lights parade and firework display. At nammet time (it is getting harder and harder to get the children out of the house) we eventually made it to the town centre. There they had the annual Christmas market and other activities. As we walked through the shopping centre, which was between where we parked to where we were going, there was a bloke bold as brass wielding a chainsaw*. Meanwhile I spotted a young woman who was probably in the 18-25 age bracket wearing a familiar-looking dress that my daughter used to wear. When she was 4. Either at least two young women really liked to dress up as a Disney princess up to 20 years after most other girls have grown out of the practice, or they were part of the centre's Christmas attractions. They have had costumed characters in there before, and everywhere these two women - who were dressed as 'Frozen's Anna and Elsa – went, they were mobbed by young children wanting to give them hugs while their parents grabbed their phones.

The children claimed to be hungry and while my wife fed them I had only a cursory glance in the second-hand shops (getting a book on James May's Toy Stories). We then rendezvoused and the children were completely uninterested in petting the Christmas market's farm animals to pet. So we went to the Baptist Church stall where they were giving away empty resources each – the idea being that if you carried the box into the nearby Baptist Church they'd give you a real resource each. Inside, the church had been turned into lots of little rooms where you'd walk through quite snazzy representations of the Holy Land 2,000 years ago, complete with Joseph's carpentry workshop, Mary's angel-infested bedroom, Herod's palace etc, with a quiz and colouring booklet for all the children and craft activities in the hall at the end. The resources we were given included for the adults and free advent calendars for the children – the ones that my wife had looked at and thought were really good, but cost too much and so hadn't bought them. And they had for 25 days! 25! Do you know how many advent calendar arguments we've had from the children over the years? Trust me – when it comes to advent calendars, at the end of the day the picture is irrelevant – they want a decent sized every day for 25 days, and if the children get calendars boasting different sizes or different numbers of , that's a ticking timebomb due to explode every morning throughout December.

After that we went to the Methodist Church, where in the church hall they were having a monthly boardgame club. Boardgame clubs seem to be springing up all over the place. So as a family we played games of 'Codenames', 'Rhino Hero: Super Battle Edition' and then my wife and son went off for parade purposes while I played '7 Wonders' for the first time (I didn't really know what I was doing and lost spectacularly) and my daughter played 'Forbidden Island'. After that my daughter and I went to watch the parade – which my son and wife were in! (My daughter hadn't wanted to be in it, you see, so I had stayed behind to look after her). They were there with puppets to advertise a Christmas Tree festival, and so were wheeling a giant around town. My son looked quite spooky in his puppet clothing, particularly with the blacklight hood. (Blacklight puppetry involves wearing black from head to toe while the fluorescent props stand out in UV light, enabling the puppeteer to effectively use the props in a way that makes it look as if they are flying etc)

While we were watching the parade – which we had queued up for a good roadside spot, only for adults to keep pushing in front of my daughter blocking her view. While one lady was kind enough to move after I tapped her on the shoulder there was one man who refused to budge, even when the marshals told him he was in the way of the fire engine. How he avoided having his feet squished I don't know, but he deserved to become flat footed. After the parade ended my daughter and I caught up with my wife and son, and as the children didn't want to watch the fireworks that accompanied the lights switching on – my daughter doesn't like the bangs and my son wanted to go indoors – we went back to the Methodist Church for & chips.

<BB<

* Turns out that he was making ice sculptures.

Well done