Like a ghost town

We didn’t do much for jubilee weekend. The concert was nice but it was very random and uneven. Some acts were really good others… less so. But I guess that’s the nature of the thing huh? (The Andrew Lloyd Weber and Lin part seemed especially… cringey.) The pageant thing the next day was nice if a tad long. I liked the random appearance of the daleks and all the puppet animals were impressive, especially that huge dragon they had!

My energy levels lately have been so low lately. This was made worse Monday when I felt woozy again and I felt like I was gonna be sick (but wasn’t). I assumed it was a 24 hour tummy bug or something (I’d not eaten anything different than mum who was fine so assumed it was cause I had my meds early on an empty stomach or something). It eased off over the course of the day and Tuesday, but alas it’s come back this morning and I’m not sure why. Ugh it’s so annoying.

Because mum helps out at the library she found out about a thing in Walsall a couple of weeks back called the festival of words. It was Wednesday and today (which I thought was odd timing having it in the middle of the week) but I was curious to see what it was and we’d not been to town for a bit.

Alas it was a bit of a mess.

The website for the festival didn’t have the best organisation. There wasn’t a programme with everything happening each day (instead every event had its own page) nor was there a clear map where everything was. The only place I could find that I recognised was the art gallery, so I thought that would be a good starting point and there might be more info there. There were fliers, with the listing of times for the events which was good, but the included map was too small and unclear. So we only really saw what was at the art gallery and heard poets on the Main Street as we passed them. (Apparently there was a play somewhere but the guy that told us about it couldn’t give us directions which was a bit bad)

The gallery itself was much better (despite being vertical and having lots of stairs). There was some striking artworks on display, I liked one of fire and the ones with trees. Plus there were a group of hippos around the art gallery which we found out were part of a trail of them done by locals (and they were scattered around town too). There was also a little queer exhibit too which was nice, and I’m gonna give the little booklet a read.

I got a few things from town, with the main thing being a Fortnite figure from Smyths (along with a Pogo funko thing), Star Wars graphic novel from Smiths and Ring Fit from a game trader place. And we also saw a guy on the street with a bird of prey (I think he said it was some sort of harrier but I can’t remember).

But it was a bit… I dunno. Walsall was never exactly the best of places to go to (we’d not been for years) but now so much has gone it feels dead. There’s no HMV, no TK Maxx, no Pizza Hut, even Marks and Spencer’s has gone. So much of the shopping center was empty it was just sad. It also wasn’t helped that when we had food at McDonald’s it came out and was barely warm (I probably should’ve complained but I don’t like doing such things).

So yeah it was ok, but I don’t see su going back anytime soon.

The main other thing I’ve been doing is Fortnite which is developing into a new hyperfixation. I was able to do the live collision event on Saturday and it ended up being pretty exciting. The new battle pass is mostly cool, largely because it has Darth Vader on the last page, along with a bunch of other Star Wars things (a probe droid, an imperial shuttle, an imperial March emote) and I like that the new chapter thing seems mostly relaxed. And the map is pretty with all the giant mushrooms and splashes of colour.

I’m gonna take it easy the rest of today, hope I feel less woozy and watch summer gamefast later.