Category Archives: Thoughts on the World

We are becoming quite the connoisseurs of balloon fiestas (unless fiesta is its own plural :)). Following on from Northampton 2008 (0 balloons) and Albuquerque 2012 (over 500 balloons) we’ve now added Britain’s biggest festival on Bristol, which featured a great balloon display this weekend, including a mass ascent on Saturday night of more than 100 balloons.

Bristol’s economic model is interesting. It’s a “free” festival, which means in practice that they have to pack in lots of punters eating lots of burgers and taking lots of rides on the funfair to break even on costs. The result was a relatively crowded and sparsely entertained afternoon, but capped by first a very exciting mass ascension, and then, when the balloons returned, by a beautifully choreographed synchronised inflation and evening glow set to a great soundtrack.

Balloon fiestas are all different, and to articulate the differences, here are our Balloon Fiesta Awards.

Best Mass Ascension: Albuquerque 2012. 500 balloons and we were part of it!

Best Entertainment (No Balloons): Northampton 2008. I don’t know whether they were expecting problems with the star attractions, but the organisers in Northampton put on an excellent day’s entertainment regardless, with stunt riders, motorcycle display teams, and an attempt on the YMCA mass singing record! Bristol was about aerial displays, but very patchy. The non-appearance of the spitfires left a big hole in the afternoon’s events. Interestingly the Albuquerque model is completely different – it’s about the balloons, and everything essentially shuts down after the morning events, and restarts for the evening about 4pm.

Best Balloon Packing: Bristol 2013. We couldn’t believe how many balloons inflated simultaneously from such a tiny field. I was a bit scared to see the baskets of balloons just taking off scraping across the canopies of those still inflating, but no obvious damage was done.

Best Traffic Management: Albuquerque 2012. The Albuquerque police took traffic management very seriously, closing or re-routing feeder roads onto and off the freeway, and the car parks were well marshalled going as well as coming. From the last bang of the fireworks to our hotel room on the other side of the city – 25 minutes!

Worst Traffic Management: Bristol 2013. The Bristol police and organisers did not make such a good job of it. We spent two hours waiting to exit the car park… From the last bang of the fireworks to a (closer) hotel – 2.5 hours!

Best Weather for a Mass Ascension: Albuquerque 2012. Sunny, warm, and a blue sky to provide a nice backdrop to the photos.

Worst Weather for a Mass Ascension: Albuquerque 2012. OK, the balloons didn’t actually fly on the Thursday. Balloons and wind don’t mix. Propane tanks and lightning strikes really, really don’t mix!

Best Night Glow: Bristol 2013: Credit where it’s due – this was superbly done. The balloons were inflated in synchronisation to music, and then the burns to light the balloons were also synchronised with the soundtrack. Brilliant.

They were all fun, and I recommend the experience wholeheartedly, but every experience will be different.

I have decided that there are essentially two types of film or play, those which are about whether to get on the train, and those which are about how to get on the train. I don’t really like the former, but I love the latter.

OK, I know that not all films and plays involve trains, but enough do that this is a surprisingly powerful classification system.

A couple of years ago we went to see a performance of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. While I may be oversimplifying things slightly, most of the second act is the sisters talking about getting on a train. I forget the details, I think one wants to move away from the family to Moscow. I can’t even remember whether she actually gets on the train or not. Despite the fact that it was a good performance by several famous British actors, many of whose other work I love, I was bored out of my skull. Frances and I were both so affected by this, that we now have an in-joke reaction to any mention of Chekhov where one of us immediately says “just get on the —— train”.

But then I realised just how many of our favourite films do involve someone getting on a train. The key difference is that there is never any debate whatsoever about the need to do so. The challenge is how.

You may have to drive your Audi off a bridge (Transporter 3), jump from a helicopter (Under Siege 2, Broken Arrow, Unstoppable), shoot lots of bad guys first (3.10 to Yuma), jump from a camel (Sahara), talk the bad guys down (Pelham 123), jump from a car (Unstoppable, Octopussy), quietly murder some of the good guys (From Russia with Love), jump from another train (Unstoppable again, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Paddington 2, The Lone Ranger), hide in a mailbag (Live and Let Die), jump from a motorbike (Skyfall, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny), run several Manhattan blocks and jump through the subway roof (Die Hard with a Vengeance), beam in (repeatedly) using a time machine (Source Code), jump from a horse (The Lone Ranger), claw into the back of the carriage with a Caterpillar digger (Skyfall again), jump from a hover-board (Back to the Future 3), couple up a car transporter (Fast Five), try and do a retinal scan from outside while the train is moving at speed, and you’re not really tall enough to reach the scanner (Mission Impossible 4), jump from a zipline tethered to the nearest alp (Captain America), lay the track as you go (The Wrong Trousers), jump into a boxcar while shackled to several other members of a chain gang (O Brother, Where Art Thou?), sneak onboard after clinging to the undercarriage (Octopussy again), jump from the subway platform (Safe, Captain Marvel, Skyfall yet again…), swing a ladder from another train (The Lone Ranger), extend a telescopic ladder from another train (Paddington 2), lasso the train while chasing it in a pump handcar (Due South, All the Queen’s Horses), jump from a bridge with a wolf in your arms (ditto), use your magnetic super-powers to latch onto the train as it goes past (X-Men Days of Future Past), leap between mine cars (Journey to the Centre of the Earth), sneak in inside a mine car full of explosive (A View to a Kill), jump from the platform of a picturesque station (Enigma), ride your motorbike off a mountain and then speed-fly with a parachute onto the train (Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning), sneak into a train with the Turkish Nationalist Army (The Water Diviner!).

If you’re undead, you might just jump from trees alongside the track (Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter), but that’s really a getting off the train film, a completely separate genre. You get the picture, and I haven’t mentioned Speed, Batman Begins, Unknown, Goldeneye, The Rock…

So do you like stories about talking about getting on a train? Or those about doing it?

(Published June 2011, updated November 2012, July 2014, September 2014, August 2016, January 2017, April 2018, July 2018, September 2018, March 2019, January 2020, May 2020, June 2020, January 2021, January 2022, December 2023 as the list grows…)