Wednesday 24th September 08

I took our youngest to school and came back in good time to get myself ready to go to work in Harrogate, for their CarFreeDay activities.

I got the 10.11 train and was met in Harrogate by a camera operator from BBC Look North who wanted to get some footage of me advertising the event. So we walked to the St Peter's Church and I got changed into Professor Fiddlesticks and went outside to unicycle around and invite people into St Peter's to see the exhibition materials from Sustrans, the Christian Ecology Network , FoE and others.

As I finished doing the unicycling around, the group toddle arrived... actually a group of about 10 mums with pre-school kids in push chairs and buggies. I don't know where they'd walked from, but they were the sort of 'customer' who might usually go places by car. I was expecting a school group to entertain but it turned out that the youngsters were these pre-schoolers! So I did a half-hour show aimed at the mums, Vicar and his helpers, and the CarFreeDay volunteers... which seemed to go well.

Then Yvonne invited me to come to lunch... which I wasn't expecting. We went to a mock-French place and the service was slow and several people didn't get what they asked for. I had a tomato soup and baguette 'pizza'. Thanks to Malcolm Margolis for this. At least the long wait allowed us to chat!

Back to St Peters where the displays were starting to be taken down, and I chatted to a nice couple called Rachel and Dan, with a cute baby, and an enthusiastic chap called Lee and his friend Adrian...

I went to get the 3.05 train but missed it by 3 minutes so read my NewScientist and got home before 5. On the Leeds 'Look North' there was a brief mention of Professor Fiddlesticks, see
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/ondemand/england/realmedia/looknorthyorkslincs/looknorth?bgc=C0C0C0&nbram=1&lang=en&nbwm=1&bbram=1&ms3=6&ms_javascript=true&bbcws=1&size=16x9&bbwm=1#
It's about 3 minutes 20 seconds in...

Later in the evening I got a call from a friend/neighbour who had a bust-up with her 17 yr old daughter and she'd locked her out of the house, partly as the daughter had some large chaps with her and Mum was not feeling safe. I negotiated that the daughter came in, got her overnight stuff and rang one of her brothers who said he'd let her sleep over for a night. I stayed in the house whilst the daughter got her stuff together and left. Happy families eh?

Nearly finished my column on Electrics and Gadgets, but it's too long so will edit it down tomorrow.