Get your retro thrills here! We found an old Victorian-style carousel with horses and crazy fairground music and just couldn’t resist. The whole thing looks very genteel, but it’s a different story when you actually climb on. It goes a lot faster than you think and there’s nothing to stop you from falling off!
See the stills from Christmas Carousel here.
The second part of my trip to Amsterdam.
The majestic grandeur of a canal-side townhouse
When I lived in Amsterdam, ten years ago, I was informed by a gruff Dutchman that Christmas was an English thing, as he glared disapprovingly at my baubles which I was trying to hang in the foyer of the cable TV station where I worked. My step-ladders barely wobbled as I pointed out that Christmas owes a lot more to the Germans than the Victorians. I decided not to mention that Charles Dickens virtually created the notion of a White Christmas, and went on to highlight the uncanny similarities between the Dutch and the Germans. This led to much angry spluttering and indignant red faces, due to the Nazi occupation of Holland in the Second World War, a fact which seemed to have slipped my mind. Amazingly.
A crowd gathered in the canteen and I decided to make my position even more precarious by reasoning that since Holland was essentially a little bump on the coast of Germany, the Dutch should logically love Christmas too, since they were basically German. Things became rowdy and I was led away to safety. A large man in a pin-stripe suit shouted, ‘You waste your time and our money!’
Now, forgive me, but I really think that was exactly the reason why I moved to Amsterdam in the first place…
The lights of Amsterdam
You try and spread a little Christmas cheer… Now, of course, ten years later and the Dutch have finally realised what a money-spinner the Yuletide season really is, and embraced it with a ferocity which blows my hair back. The landscape has changed in other ways too. In my time, Amsterdam was cool. It was a cultural hub and a gay mecca, the liberalism of the hippy afterburn a perfect foil for the staunch conservatism which flowed beneath the surface. Both the European City of Culture and a beautifully preserved Bohemian paradise.
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The original version of Goldfrapp’s Winter Wonderland sounded unfinished. I finished it with a choir, bells and big drums. Tinkerbell meets Slade. I also added extra whistling and a quote from It’s a Wonderful Life at the end. I think it’s Animal from The Muppets on drums…enjoy and have a great Christmas.
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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.
See the movie The Haunted Carousel here!
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