In which the Turtles enjoy a day by the sea.

Tuesday 23rd October

So, it's 8am on Tuesday morning and I'm sitting on the seafront in Brighton in the glorious sunshine, eating a big fat fried breakfast.

Whenever the M25 is involved in your morning drive it pays to be off early - that extra half hour can make all the difference. So with no need to call at Rainbow first or pick anyone else up, I set off at the crack of dawn with the Turtles and the standees, arriving with time aplenty to have an early morning walk along the beach and a full english breakfast before the rest of the gang arrived.

First venue of the day was the Brighton Sea Life Centre, a tremendous attraction, as it turns out - I must go back sometime for a day out and visit it properly. Not today though, as Team Turtle had a full day's work ahead of us. For we roadies the days this week are fuller than usual, as at each venue we need not only to kit the Turtles up, but we're also pitching in to help The Lovely Emily with setting up the standees and ferrying all the boxes of merchandise in and out. To make things even more fun, The Lovely Emily comes armed with two polaroid cameras and stacks of presentation cards so that everyone can have an official photograph of themselves with the Turtles, requiring the three of us to form a frantic human chain, taking photos, stuffing them in cards and preparing the next film cartridge whilst trying not to drop any of the aforementioned all over the floor.

In complete contrast to yesterday's farcical proceedings, the morning went off extremely well, with the Turtles making two appearances outside in the sunny courtyard entrance, interspersed with Taekwondo demonstrations from local Taekwonding chids. It was a great shame really that we couldn't stay there all day, but with only the briefest pause for me to buy comical penguins from the gift shop, we had to pack the whole lot up again and drive to a big ASDA.

Yeah, a big ASDA. When you've spent the morning at a major tourist attraction where people are having fun and there's nice tea and you're out in the sunshine, moving on to a big ASDA is a bit of a downer. So to make things more interesting, the Turtles staged a pitched battle in the store entrance with the Taekwondo childs, which they lost, and which irritated everyone who was trying to get into ASDA to do shopping, rather than to watch white pyjama-clad childs pretending to kick in six-foot rubber turtles.

Unfortunately I had to drive home via Rainbow to drop everything off, as tomorrow I'm at DSL and Sandy is booked on another job, so a completely different crew is covering the day. I say unfortunately, but it did at least mean that I got to spend a bit more time playing in the nice hire car they'd given me. I don't much like modern cars - they tend to be full of black plastic and have seats that controt your body into the most unnatural positions. But I have quite taken to the Seat Leon - it has a sort of blunt, brutish beauty and goes far faster than is really sensible. They are, of course, ridiculously unsuited to doing Rainbow jobs as their design is not terribly concerned with having enough space to carry several big bags of costume, and is more concerned with looking a bit mean and being able to accelerate with surprising alacrity. In stark contrast to my own car which, being French, tends to accelerate rather more languidly, as and when she feels like it. Put your foot down when driving Oona, and you have the distinct impression of her taking a luxurious drag on a cigarette and stubbing it delicately out before she deigns to pull away from the lights. Still, the seats are comfy, which observation speaks volumes for my advancing age.