Christmas Carousel

This should get you in the mood for Christmas, if you happen to be pretending it can’t be happening. Again. In amongst all the Victorian schmaltz, here’s a bolt of logic: Christmas should be like the Olympics, where countries have to bid to hold the festival every few years. Big enough humbug for you, eh? Ok, bring on the tinsel!

If you go to Manchester’s Trafford Centre, you’ll find a big Victorian Carousel with sparkly lights and horses that go up and down. Very festive.

It’s so retro and nostalgic that it had to go on my blog.

We climbed on for £2 a head and behaved like overgrown kids! Overgrown kids with HD cameras. That’s the thing about being flung around on a wooden horse with no saddle or safety harness: you’ve got to hang on for dear life and make sure you don’t drop your Panasonic. Very difficult to take pictures and my movie footage was all over the place.

Panos always seems to be riding something on this blog. Last time he was on a donkey.

The lights and the detail were amazing, and the whole experience was a bit wilder than we expected. Those Victorians knew how to rock.

The gloriously tacky Trafford Centre will feature in documentaries in the future about how it changed from Vegas-style eyesore into a temple of kitsch. I bet it even gets a Grade 1 listing. They don’t even have anything like this in Dubai, which goes some way to explaining why the Arabs bought it.