Last weekend, I went to Jorvik Viking Festival for the first time.

Here’s a video I made about our day, which included: visits to the Sherlock Holmes Imaginarium (the only place you need to go if what you need is a glow-in-the-dark ornament of a trans ghost), Portal Bookshop, Over the Rainbow cafe and the Jorvik Viking centre (featuring a dark ride where I got to live my weirdly specific fantasy of making friends with an animatronic Viking wolf); a performance of Mythos: Ragnorok (an incredible, gutsy, glorious, spectacular mix of Norse mythology and pro wrestling); and live Viking doom metal from Call of Fenrir.

There’s a lot of our day that didn’t make it into this compilation purely because I’m pretty good these days at forgetting the existence of my phone and by extension its camera, but it was a brilliant day that I’m still processing and I’ll definitely be back. I started exploring Norse mythology during my Queer Amusements residency and it’s a thread I know I want to follow further in future creative work, so the weekend was a deliciously rich chance to engage with a subculture and community connected to that shared obsession.