BarbieGirl

This is the story of Mark Watkins, SimonHuggins, JonathanMcDowell and the song Barbie Girl by Aqua.

It starts grounded in FidoNet. Simon and Jonathan met through shared echos on fidonet which was a BBS based discussion groups. Fidonet has mostly died now. There are still a few Internet nodes, and a few old style BBS nodes but mostly people have given up and moved onto usenet or other things.

Anyway, Simon met Jonathan on fidonet (which someone is welcome to describe better than I have) and one of the groups they frequented had a meet in Kent. In fact Rupert Woolger arranged that we'd meet in Eastbourne (for some strange reason that no one present could really figure out). Jonathan came over from Northern Ireland and stayed at Simon's and Mark Watkins kindly offered to give them a lift to Eastbourne.

Only Mark had just got hold of a prerelease of Aqua's Barbie Girl somehow. That was all that was on the CD that he took in the car. All the way from Sevenoaks to Eastbourne. On repeat. At high volume. It's not a bad song, but it's now just so engrained in our memory.

Well that and having to tell Mark to "STOP" occasionally (especially when we nearly flew into the side of a pub across a crossroads) and to "GO" whenever we were at a roundabout. He'd only recently passed his test so it was an interesting experience in life preservation.

That's probably a bit unfair. We were both very grateful to be driven down.

To this day I still remember that journey very vividly. All in all it was a bizarre evening. I still like Barbie Girl as it reminds me of the journey. It's also quite a good song in a very odd kind of way.

-- SimonHuggins

You forgot about the cheese. Rupert asked if anyone had any preference for a restaurant. And I said I didn't care as long as they did stuff without cooked cheese. So Rupert chose what is probably the only restaurant in the world that *only* does food that involves cooked cheese. So we went and had curry elsewhere. Muppet.

-- JonathanMcDowell

Simon, I now understand why you always hated Dave's music so much, especially Aqua....

-- TobyJaffey