Waiver, waver

Easter has been all arse backwards this year. Good Friday was all wrong for starters; I missed out on seeing the people marching through the streets of Goodmayes carrying the cross to commemorate the time that Jesus marched through the streets of Goodmayes carrying the cross, as I went to see my parents for the day and so had no need of the usual trip to Tesco for supplies. Whereas on Easter Sunday, when I would usually go to see my parents, I stayed at home as my mum was off seeing the stars of Dancing On Ice. (Doing ice skating, obviously; it would be a bit pointless going to see the stars of Dancing On Ice doing the jobs that originally brought them to minor fame, as it wouldn't make for a very coherent show.) Apparently the show featured some sort of voting element in the style of the TV equivalent, which seems a mite risky given one thing and another, and a mite unfair what with people having already paid their money to see the show, but that's our modern corporate world of today I suppose.

While I'd been at my parents' on Friday my aunt had mentioned something about a motorbike rally taking place in Southend today; as such, as I made my way back from the supermarket I was less surprised than I might have been to see around 50-60 motorbikes waiting at the traffic lights. As I walked down the road I could see (or, perhaps more precisely given the hedge obstructing my view, hear) a steady stream of bikes following them. This was still going on by the time I reached the crossing point, from where I had a much better view; there seemed to be all sorts of bikes and bikers involved, from scary looking old blokes with big grey beards on brutal-looking machines who could probably hear Born To Be Wild playing on a continual loop in their head, to couples in matching leathers (the woman, inevitably, being the one riding pillion, if the amount of hair streaming from underneath the passengers' helmets was anything to go by), to a guy with L plates on a fairly weedy looking bike who, come to think of it, may have been out for a training ride and unexpectedly found himself caught up in the excitement of it all.

My curiosity extended to looking up the event, which is pleasingly named Southend Shakedown, probably the best name for a charity event I've ever come across. And it actually looked like tremendous fun; I've never had any desire to own a motorbike, in much the same way that I've never had any desire to own a car, but for a few moment I found myself considering the possibility; then I remembered my innate clumsiness, which would probably see me severely injured within about a quarter of an hour of sitting on the bike in the first place.

Perhaps the oddest feature of the weekend has been the addition of something that appears to be some sort of tent to the ravishing view of the Essex countryside from my back window. In the day it appears to be white, and by night it glows with blue and red light. I did wonder if it might be a circus or something of a similar ilk, as the open fields that I can see in the distance would seem like quite a good place to set up such a thing, although I suppose it could be The Klaxons paying homage to the heady days of the Old Rave scene by putting on shows in the middle of nowhere and playing their hit tunes, "The One That's Quite Good" and "The One That Sounds A Bit Like Hard-Fi" to a delirious bank holiday crowd.