Hello Plus Member. I do hope you're feeling well today. When was the last time you went to a fairground or a theme park? I want you to picture this. You're standing in line. The anticipation is building as you inch closer to the roller coaster. Your heart races, your palms sweat, and a mix of excitement and nervousness runs through your veins. Now for many roller coaster enthusiasts, this wait just helps build the excitement. But for others, the anticipation can just be too much. Maybe they become more and more anxious and start to feel that, no, no, I can't do it. And they have to duck out. I have definitely witnessed people ducking out of line while waiting to board a roller coaster. Now I'm not alone here because talking about roller coasters today, there's someone that I have right with me, right now, who's a big fan of roller coasters. Isn't that right? Hello, Anna. Hello, Plus Member. Hello. When was the last time you went on a roller coaster? I think it was the same time that you went on a roller coaster, wasn't it? That's right. It wasn't that long ago. We were at Legoland and we went on quite a tame roller coaster with our children who are three and five and they were just going crazy for it. And I think that was the right level of roller coaster for me. Thrilling enough for a three year old. Maybe a little bit scary for a three year old. Perfect for me. How did you find it? I enjoyed it the most because of how much the children enjoyed it. But I love a roller coaster. I can't think of anything I like more. I almost go into hysterics when I'm on a rollercoaster. I enjoy it so much. Have you ever had any negative experiences on a rollercoaster? No. When was your, like, first rollercoaster experience? Can you remember? Probably when I mean, I might've been on something small, on like a pier or something with my grandparents when I was younger. But my first experience of a proper roller coaster, like a global level theme park, roller coaster ride was with a friend's family. And we went to Alton Towers way up north and it was a four o'clock in the morning wake up, get in the car from Bristol up to Alton Towers, which is on the edge of the Peak District. It's a three hour drive, three and a half, maybe. Okay. So you were committed. It was a commitment time. It was a single day there and back, big day out and it was just the best thing I ever did. Yeah, Alton Towers is definitely a fantastic theme park to go to if you're visiting the UK and you're going to be in the north of the UK, then see how close you are to Alton Towers. And if you can get there, I would say these days, you need at least a couple of days to make the most of your time there because it's so huge, isn't it? We went last year and I'd forgotten how big it is. Maybe it's expanded. Yeah. Well, it expands all the time. Have you seen the picture of it when it first started? And it's a helter skelter. There's a photo and you can see a helter skelter through the doorway of a ruined building. Right. Of a ruined castle. Right. And now it's this sprawling metropolis of adventure and excitement. Yeah. And for the little children they have CBeebies World or is it CBeebies Land? I think it's land. Yeah, which is a section dedicated to CBeebies, which is on the BBC. It's a channel that specifically provides content for young children. And that's why we were there last year, because we're all about the kids these days, but you were kind of drooling, looking at those humongous, crazy big rides. Yeah. That just make me feel a bit lightheaded just looking at them, looking up, it makes me lightheaded. Now we went on a day out and I think I did a podcast episode called"My Beef with the Theme Parks" based on that day out, we put the kids in childcare and we took a very selfish day, just the two of us. We went to Thorpe Park, which is a theme park that's aimed or geared more towards older children, teenagers, and adults. And in our entire day, we managed to make three rides, didn't we? Because the queues were so ridiculous. And I remember one of those particular rides was a bad experience for me. Do you remember that? No, I don't. What was it? So it was a thrilling ride. It was the last one we went on. It was a thrilling ride. But at the end, like as you were going around the, the strap, it's not a strap. What would you call it? There's like the safety guard that comes down. The bar. The bar. Yeah. The bar that comes down over both shoulders and holds you tight down from your chest was getting tighter and tighter because of the G force as you went around. And then when we stopped and you finally had a chance to get your breath, I felt that it was so tight on my chest that I couldn't breathe. And I have a tendency to sometimes slightly panic and get anxious if I feel trapped and I couldn't breathe. And I felt like I was trapped and this thing was pressing heavy on my chest. Yeah. I remember that one quite well, actually, because I had the same feeling of entrapment. And for the listeners, the ride itself, it spins around in circles, doesn't it? So it does spirals rather than a round, you know, backwards loop-the-loop, it does a corkscrew. And so, it's super important that they hold you in right, because you'd go flying out. But yeah, when we stopped, I just couldn't move, couldn't move at all. And the ride in front of us, the carriage in front of us was stalled. It's like they were taking ages to get people on or off, or it had some sort of malfunction. And so we were being held and we just had to wait. We couldn't do anything. We couldn't signal anyone. We were just waiting out on the track to then be brought into the area where we would disembark the ride. Alight the ride. Oh, alight. Yes, we use that word, don't we? Now, roller coasters make me nervous these days because I do have a tendency to suffer with motion sickness. Now I know this because I used to get sick just being in the car. If I dare look at my phone for more than a few seconds in the car or try to read something, I'm instantly foaming at the mouth and feeling like I need to vomit. And so roller coasters can really play on your balance and can cause motion sickness if you are someone who struggles with that. Is that something that's ever plagued you? No, I I honestly think I must have a better than top one percent motion sickness, I don't know what would be the right word? But my constitution of my stomach is incredible. So we could say you have a cast iron stomach. Nothing makes you feel sick. Would we say cast iron stomach for kind of vertigo, emotion sickness, or just for eating bad food? Oh, I don't know. But yeah so I had this one experience where, so I always used to think to myself, I don't suffer from motion sickness in cars. I can read or play games, be on my phone or whatever with moving vehicles and I'd never ever had a problem. And, I'd been on lots of boats and that had been fine as well. And lots of other people had, had felt sick. And even in relatively sort of stormy or choppy waters, I'd never felt motion sickness at all. And I, you know, I felt good about my ability to deal with motion sickness. And then one day I was in Thailand and we needed to take a catamaran across the Bay of Thailand, the Bay of Bangkok. And it was very, very stormy and all of the ferries had been cancelled apart from the catamaran and I had a ticket for the catamaran so it was fine. So on we got and they were giving everybody plastic bags on the way in and I said what are you giving me this for and he said oh it's for in case you feel seasick and I thought it's amazing they're giving it to everybody. That's a bit over the top, don't you think? And I almost gave it back to them and said, I won't need this. And they said, no, please take it. And I'd never been on as tumultuous of an ocean or not an ocean, but the sea that we were in ever before. It was unbelievable. And every single person around me was being sick apart from one person who was kind of adjacent, a bit further down the seats that were sort of facing into each other. Yeah. And we kept on locking eyes and being like, we're in this together. We're all fine. But it was, everybody was being sick and, and I started to feel a bit sick as well. And I did that thing. Do you ever do this? Where you look out the window, somebody says, focus on the horizon. Yeah. Focus on something that's fixed because it helps your body deal with the motion sickness and recognise what's happening to you. So I was trying to do that. But the sea that we were in was so wavy that you could only see just sea, because it was tilted so far down that you were staring at the bottom of the sea from the top of this wave, or you could see just sky, and then for a second in between, you'd have this big rock, and then a big bang as well, when it slammed onto the ground. Not onto the ground, when it slammed down off the wave. Off the wave and back onto the sea. It was a very, very scary experience. And then I looked across at my partner that we were, we were both holding tight and he was being sick as well. And I was the last person to hold out, which I did. But it shows you, you know, there was 500 people on that boat and I must have been the only person not being sick. It's interesting that we have all these terms for essentially the same sickness. The sickness is motion sickness, when your body gets confused because of all the motion and you can't recognise where you are in that moving space. So it's motion sickness, but you will hear people say travel sickness, car sick. You said seasick, which is another one obviously from when you're on a boat. And so it all means the same thing. It just means you're feeling sick because of the movement. Yeah. But yeah, you held out to the very last, but you're not completely. I thought I was going to go. And then I just fell asleep. Oh, so you didn't throw up. Oh, well done. Well done you. Okay, so coming back to roller coasters. In the early days of roller coasters, when they didn't have seat belts, when people were constantly being thrown out, I was just watching a TED Talk about roller coasters and apparently your body can take up to something like 6G. The G force like level six, but the early days of roller coasters, the roller coasters were throwing you around at something like 12 G. So people were going blind, people were passing out, people were being thrown out of the roller coasters. I don't think I would have been brave enough to ride on an early day roller coaster. Do you think you would have been thrill seeking enough to have a go? Well, so I think the same question is true when you go to countries that don't necessarily have the same safety regulations as we do. There are some horror stories. In fact, there's some horror stories from ones in the UK as well, but, they're very, very few and far between. But I think, you know, I'm cautious of going on roller coasters in other countries and also going on water slides as well Because you can get thrown out of water slides if you go too fast and I do go fast on a water slide. Not to blow my own trumpet. Shoulders and heels all the way. But you can see why when when you look at how bad early day roller coasters were and how often people were injured or killed on those roller coasters, you can see why they are called white knuckle rides. So white knuckle, I'm guessing, is because you would hold on so tight that your knuckles go white. The blood drains from your knuckles because you are holding on so tight and they're that scary that it's referred to as a white knuckle ride. Now interestingly, I used to be on tour with someone who would drive so badly. And we were in the vehicle with this person every single day. He would drive so badly that it just became known as, rather than the commute to work, it was the white knuckle ride because we were all so nervous that this guy was going to crash the van and kill us all. But yeah, I think my least favourite roller coaster experience in general is when you go to like the seaside towns and they've got the older like fun fair. Yeah, very rickety. Very rickety, all made out of wood. Whereas these days, roller coasters in the kinds of theme parks that we've been going to lately, it's a lot of metal being used. So it feels really sturdy, but If you go to say Southport Beach, or maybe Brighton or somewhere where they've got these, these old kind of Victorian funfairs, it's all made out of wood and you can hear it all creaking and rattling as you're going around. Some of those older ones, I find that my head gets thrown around quite a lot, like side to side and back and forth. And, and I always end up with whiplash or a sense of whiplash. I only realised or found out I think, you know, in the last year that most roller coasters and certainly all the old ones, which is why I think I found this out, they're all just gravity fed. So you get hoicked up to the top on some kind of contraption, you know, with a motor or a chain or something. And when you get to the top, you just roll over the edge and off you go. And that made me feel a lot less safe because I think in the modern ones, a lot of them are also gravity based, but they kind of control the speed a bit more. It's supposed to be going certain speeds around certain directions. In those old ones, it was different whether you were on it with a load of adults or on it on your own, you'd go different speeds, right? And there's an element of sort of, Unpredictability. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. What I watched this morning was talking about the fact that they are based on gravitational energy. So it's that kinetic energy, you build it up as you go down and then the energy slows. I don't know. I don't know. I don't, I'm not very good at talking about energy. This is why I failed in physics, but yeah, gravity. I remember doing physics at school. We learned about potential energy and I was like, what's potential energy?'Cause a lot of the other types of energy would make sense. And my science teacher said, well, if I take this ball and I hold it up in the air, it has the potential that is stored in it from gravity to move to the bottom. And that's a release of energy. And it's quite interesting thinking about potential energy on a roller coaster, cause it's the potential of the ride, right? Absolutely. Right. So we have covered quite a few words. I particularly liked your unusual, hoicked us up phrase. I'm not sure if you would find hoick in the dictionary, but that's. I think you would, but it might be used slightly differently. Yeah, I don't know. We should look that up, but you know, this is what happens and I'm sure everyone listening, you do it in your own language as well. You just sometimes make up words that maybe sound like other things that you actually meant to say, or it just sounds fun. And everyone listening will usually just accept it because they know what you're trying to say. So, you know, typical natives just butchering their own language, is it butchering or is it being creative? I like to think it's creative and innovative. Oh, innovative. Yes. Hoick us up. Okay. So there's a couple of words that I do want to reiterate so that you know that they're really, really important. very much concerned with the topic of roller coasters and other things as well. So the first thing I want to mention is whiplash, which we just briefly discussed. Whiplash is that injury that you get when you're travelling forward and then you suddenly stop, but your head kind of keeps moving and it like just makes your head move forward and backwards at a really fast speed and it like injures your neck. So it's called whiplash and it tends to happen when people have car accidents especially if they're sitting stationary and someone drives into the back of them quite fast that would give you whiplash it would make your body move forward but your head would pull back. Not a very nice injury quite common We talked about white knuckle rides. So a white knuckle ride would be a noun and it would describe any kind of ride, whether that be a ride in an airplane, in a car, on a train, a roller coaster. If you describe it as a white knuckle ride, then it was really scary, terrifying. You would describe yourself as being lightheaded if you feel dizzy. You can feel lightheaded for many reasons, but you would feel lightheaded potentially if you're being thrown around at 6G on a fast roller coaster and all the blood is rushing from your head down to your toes. Then you would feel lightheaded. It doesn't take much to make me feel lightheaded. Sometimes I just need to stand up. But I think that's just getting older. I think that's what happens. You get that as well. Don't you, Nick? It's not just me. Yeah. I think a lot of people get that. Okay. Good. Not just me then. Okay. I also mentioned motion sickness. So that sensation of feeling unwell when you are travelling or moving, especially when you haven't been focusing on something like a horizon, something that's nice and steady, that allows you to figure out where your body is in space. I used the word tame right at the very beginning of this discussion when discussing the last roller coaster ride we went on with my five year old and three year old, and I said it was quite a tame roller coaster. Now tame means, in this context, that it was not too scary. It wasn't too extreme. So a tame ride is one that's gonna to be a little thrilling, but not very much. Tame rides are good for children, not good for daddies. And I also wanted to mention the word pier, pier, we spell this P I E R, and you'll find many piers in the UK. I don't know how popular they are in other countries. I have seen a few piers when I've been doing my travels. It's basically like a structure that you find on the coast where people can walk out really far into a coastline, like into the sea. It comes from the beach and goes into the sea, all on the same level, built out of wood. They were very much a Victorian thing, weren't they? Yeah, I think they were Victorian. They were the centerpieces of beach holiday resort towns like Blackpool and Brighton. Bournemouth. And in the UK, in the Victorian period, people would holiday on the coast of the UK rather than going abroad. And places like Blackpool and Bournemouth and Brighton and places with beaches would have these piers. So yeah, very much Victorian. And some of them have. little fun fairs and miniature rides actually at the end of the pier. Some of them have ballrooms and all sorts of nightlife that you can enjoy, which I think is a bit dangerous when you're literally, you know, suspended above the ocean and you're coming out drunk in the dark and you might just, you know, fall over. You just get on the mini train. Oh yeah. Some of them have trains that go from the start to the finish because some of them are very long. There was a fire, wasn't there? Not so long ago. Wasn't that on Brighton pier? It was one of the most iconic piers and there was a fire which was devastating'cause I don't think it's something that's cheap to rebuild. Anyway, so that's a pier. If you look them up on Google, you'll get an idea for what we're talking about. Well, I do hope you found today interesting and useful and maybe I've inspired you to go to the fair or to a theme park and... Or to a pier. Or to a pier but however, you get your thrills I hope that you are safe and that you have a great time. Until tomorrow take very good care and goodbye.