In which I find Cardiff full of monsters.

Saturday 27th October

Now, I bet you were all thinking that yesterday's outing was the last we'd be hearing of Ninja Turtles and that your author might at long last be looking at a proper night's sleep and a day off. Well, if you were thinking that you'd be all wrong, because once again I was in the car at 6am, heading down to Rainbow to pick up a new set of costumes and artistes. Much as it hurts the brain, eyes and spirit sometime to be going to work at this time in a morning, there is one big plus point, which is getting to take a leisurely drive over Hammersmith Bridge on the way from Ealing down to Wimbledon. For anyone who isn't familiar with Hammersmith Bridge, it's a work of industrial Victorian beauty spanning the Thames between Hammersmith and Barnes, notable for being the bridge Philip Marlowe's mother jumped off in The Singing Detective. The sight of it in the early morning sunlight, and the views it offers up and down this stretch of the river, are enough to make even the most hardened hater of mornings glad to be up and awake and serve on each crossing to remind me what a visually stunning city London is.

At Rainbow I picked up Ed and one lone Ninja Turtle and we set off to the brand new sports stadium in Cardiff, whose proper name I would know if I had any interest in sport. Which I don't. Since investing in a shiny new ipod specifically for playing in the car on long journeys, I've been disappointed to find that for some reason as yet unexplained it makes my ears hurt. Not through using earphones (which I don't, really), nor through excessive volume, this pain in my ears remains a mystery. My only guesses are that either the sound compression is done in such a way that disturbs my personal ear/brain interface whatsit (though apparrently no-one else's), or that along with the music, the ipod is also transmitting the high frequency noise madfe by the hard disc spinning, and it's this that my lug hole don't like. This obviously was a big disappointment to me, who had blithely expected the sound quality to be perfect and wonderful and all my in-car entertainment issues to be solved in one fell and shiny swoop. Now I'm noticing that the pain has noticeably eased, leading me to suspect that I've permanently obliterated some important and delicate parts of my ears.

Cardiff was busy. In fact, Cardiff was packed. Everyone was in Cardiff, and they'd come to see a festival of Monster Trucks. So, as it turned out, had we. We rendezvoused (is that a word?) with the other half of our party, Sandy, Maria and Emily, at the stadium and were told that the road was about to be closed until 11pm, so Sandy and I left performers and skins there and went off to find somewhere to park. This was only the first fun game of the evening. Having spent about half an hour driving in circles round the nearest car park (which, helpfully, was bloody miles away) we then found that we had no change between us. With the clock ticking, we found enough to park Sandy's car, then leaving the keys with her, I set off running back to the stadium in a brave attempt to get the characters out on time. We just about did it as well, and found ourselves in the middle of the Milennium Stadium (that's its name!) surrounded by gigantic distorted vehicles and the fifty-odd thousand people who'd come to see them. For the artistes, this is a nightmare scenario, as not only can they not see much, but add the noise of the crowd and huge vehicles vrumming at each other and their hearing is pretty much done for as well. Our Power Ranger and Totally Spy fared better since they're really just lycra and helmets, but the poor Turtle was reduced to being led around by the hand in a sad underminin of his fiersome ninja qualities.

Feeding the meter half way through the evening meant another run around the increasingly busy streets of Cardiff for me, but then came the week's final act of mercy when it was announced that we would be finished by eight o'clock. Like sweaty and defeated lightning we packed up and lugged everything back to the cars, whereupon I managed to lose any and all of the advantage our early finish had given us by getting lost in the fog and joining the motorway in the wrong direction.

And so at around midnight I finally and for the last time this week arrived at Rainbow and dumped the kit, before turning the plastic Ford towards home and bed.