I bought one of those t-shirts I mentioned that I was tempted by so now I can go around proudly displaying my Bristolian heritage on my chest. Although due to the positioning it does imply that I have an inflated opinion of the quality of certain parts of my anatomy … :-/ Anyway … ahem …
Gert Lush
Today we had a little outing to Bristol Temple Meads Station. It’s about 10 minutes on the train from the station near my Mum’s and there’s plenty of trains. Richard was down there already as he was helping out at the “Foreign Field Southern LRP Kit Fair 2011″ so we decided it would be fun to have a little ride on the train and go and say hello. I was rather childishly excited about a trip on the train – more so that the children! I do rather like train journeys – longer ones tend to get spoilt by the worry of connections and standing around on stations in the cold, but a little trip like this is just fun 
Bristol Temple Meads is an impressive station – designed by one of Bristol’s most famous people from history Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Although the main part of the current station isn’t one of the bits he designed as they extended it later. Anyway, he was pretty important in the history of the station. When I was at school we had houses named after various important Bristol people and my house was called Tyndale Brunel – named after William Tyndale and Isambard Kingdom Brunel … so clearly he was important. Well, my school thought so … anyway, back to the point, if there was one! Some pictures of the station:
The Kit Fair was in the “Passenger Shed”, one of the older parts of the station, actually designed by Brunel, which actually is not a bit that passengers go in any more. LRP if you don’t know (and many people don’t) stands for “Live Role Play”, as in people running around in woods dressed as elves, warriors, soldiers and stuff. Richard is into that sort of thing … not me … but anyway the Fair was fun. We came out with a few purchases – Abi had a cool mask (like you’d wear at a masked ball), Ben had a pair of daggers (made of foam but very realistic) and I had a dress. I’m going along to a LRP event in a couple of weeks with Richard – not going to get very involved, but will attend the banquet so would be nice to be dressed appropriately My dress is lovely, and was quite cheap compared with some of the prices, so I was very happy with it. It needs a wee bit of adjustment here and there so I won’t post pictures now – you can see it when it’s sorted out. But you can have pics of the kids with their purchases!
And finally, we may have lowered the tone slightly while we waited for our train …
I’m visiting the parents in Bristol this weekend. When I’m here I get more Bristolian and you might catch me with a proper “ooh aar” West Country accent going on. Back home in Wales I sometimes sound quite Welsh … apart from my Ts. As work colleagues will confirm, I don’t sound my Ts much, apart from of course when they are vital to the word – e.g. “a cup of Tea” Twitter became known for a while as Twi’er, when we wrote it down for any reason, after some mickey taking of how I say it! Back here in the place where I grew up it would almost sound posh to say Twitter properly and everyone drops Ts all over the place There are many other delights to the Bristol accent/dialect, such as the marvellous phrase “alright me luvver?” (which only works in a proper gert lush Bristol accent).
If you want to know more about the Bristol accent (or even if you just fancy a laugh) go to the Beast Clothing: The Brizzle Lesson – made me giggle anyway – might only have that effect if you are yourself a Bristolian though! I only came across it from a Google Search but now I might just have to buy a t-shirt!
