A Memory of a True Event When Me and Gordon Rode a Simulator

Once, the fair came to Cambridge and Midsummer Common was littered with old chip wrappers, toffee apple sticks, caravans and rickety looking rides.

     

There were many rides, and most of them were designed to make you feel sick. Not wishing to throw up, me and Gordon had a look for a ride that didn’t spin. There were two simulators; one was a typical looking simulator, formed from red plastic and shaped like a humbug, it showed scenes from rollercoasters, and the other, shaped like an Apollo rocket, showed an out of space adventure, described as ‘thrilling’, ‘bizarre’ and ‘stupendous’. That one sounded fun, so we boarded the spaceship and waited for our bizarre, thrilling, stupendous experience. The advertising was correct in one way. It was bizarre. 

The first thing that we noticed was that the screen was small. We were sitting two by two in a long capsule and the screen at the end was smaller than the one in my bedroom. We told ourselves that a larger screen would come down shortly but it never did. The tiny screen showed a rocket launching, but this footage was stock footage from the outside, not from the perspective we were supposed to be in at all. Then the video cut strangely to some poorly animated clay stop-motion, with a voiceover in German that crept through the television’s tinny speakers. Throughout these unconnected bits of video, the capsule made spastic gestures some way or another. The movement had little or no relation to what happened on the screen. 

Gordon wanted his money back but I didn’t see any problem with it. You sat, were shook and nothing made sense. It reminded of most days. Stuff just happens.