Latest news with #TheSea
North Wales Live
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- North Wales Live
Visitors will 'never get bored' at Butlins with up to 40% off family breaks this summer
Butlin's has pulled out all the stops for staycationers this summer with the grand opening of its biggest-ever indoor Soft Play centre and a brand-new Puppet Theatre. The new additions at its Bognor Regis resort are already making waves with families across the UK, with thousands more expected to visit during the school holidays. Spanning 3,000 square feet over four floors, the new soft play centre can now welcome up to 200 energetic little adventurers at a time, doubling the capacity of its previous space. Entrance to the play space is included in the price of a family break and day passes. Designed for children of all ages, the Skyline Soft Play is split into three zones, each inspired by the colourful characters of the popular Butlin's Skyline member has a devoted section, jam-packed with slides, climbing challenges, log ramps, cargo nets and more, plus a spacious multi-sensory area for babies. To keep parents amused while the children play, there is also a comfy new 100-seat café area where they can relax with a cuppa while the kids burn off some energy. The new soft play centre ramps up the fun following the opening of the £15 million indoor activity centre PLAYXPERIENCE - a 50,000 square feet state-of-the-art immersive gaming attraction - last year. The West Sussex resort has another new opening alongside its soft play centre. The new Puppet Theatre showcases magical, family-friendly string puppet shows. New shows likeUnder The Sea, Jingle in the Jungle and Christmouse are just a taste of what's in store for guests this year. Helping to keep costs down for families, the puppet shows are free for families on Butlin's breaks and day visits. The entertainment team promises guests string-pulling fun, laugh-out-loud characters, and plenty of "oohs" and "aahs" from the little ones. This £1.8 million investment is the latest in a string of new developments across Butlin's three seaside resorts. The £15 million indoor activity centre PLAYXPERIENCE at Bognor Regis offers nine immersive gaming experiences including laser tag, a VR games arcade, escape rooms and more. A second £2.5 million SKYPARK opened in Minehead, an inclusive and interactive playground for children of all abilities. Last year also saw a £12 million investment in new Premium Lodges at the Maple Walk village in Skegness, 128 contemporary-designed lodges located at the heart of the Lincolnshire resort. Holiday Parks are very much a Great British institution, with millions of families joining in the fun year after year. If Butlin's isn't quite right, there are others to choose from. Haven Holidays, for example, is known for its scenic coastal settings and caravan options. Great for nature lovers and seaside fun, Butlins still leads the pack when it comes to immersive family entertainment and themed experiences. Alternatively, Parkdean Resorts offer a similar experience with 66 parks in popular coastal locations across the UK. Much like Haven, they feature swimming pools, on-site restaurants and a variety of family-friendly activities by the seaside. Center Parcs is also a firm favourite among holidaymakers, offering a wide range of activities across multiple forest locations in the UK. Loved by many, the only downside is the high price tag which can get very expensive, especially during school holidays. Guests who have already enjoyed a stay at Butlins Bognor Regis have left over 3,900 five-star reviews on TripAdvisor. One visitor said: "We had a lovely Easter break M-F at Butlins Bognor. Top quality entertainment, engaging and friendly staff, and we had the weather too. Such good fun for young and old alike. Very impressed with the new soft play, the Splash water park was fabulous and from start to finish we received nothing but exceptional customer service." Another said: "This was our third visit to Butlins within two years, needless to say we absolutely love brand new soft play and play experience are brilliant, soft play has very generous opening hours and the staff are really observant, looks like a much better replacement from the arena soft play. One family said: "We had a fun-filled tots week, busy all day, every day. Playxperience was a new 1 for us and we all enjoyed neo games- 4yr old right up to 60s." Not every visitor was quite so impressed. A disappointed reviewer said: "Decided to give Butlins a go for half term. Overall, for us adults, everything was a bit meh except for the entertainment, which was awesome." Another added: "Lots to do, great entertainment and things to do. The chalets are quite run down though - bedding is frayed and beds aren't that great." Summing it up, another five-star review added: " Always things to do, never get bored. Very clean apartment. New playxperience building is very good, packed with new, fun experiences. Had great fun in laser tag. Brilliant and helpful staff." Butlins is currently offering 40% off stays for 2025. These include Midweek Showtime breaks at Bognor Regis from £69 in June, Summer Holidays Feat Stephen Mulhern 3-night breaks from £352 and Justin Fletcher Tots Breaks from £79 in September.
National Post
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- National Post
Summer 2025 reading list: Top picks from Canadian authors
Article content With the arrival of warmer weather, that means it's time to start planning your summer reading list. And for those who love supporting home-grown talent, why not add a few titles from Canadian authors to the list? Article content Both Indigo and Amazon have a dedicated Canadian landing page, making it easy to add some Canadian spirit to your summer bookshelf. You'll find a range of bestsellers, new releases and prize-winning books to choose from, many of which are on sale right now. Article content Article content Fans of Carley Fortune's Meet Me By The Lake will be thrilled to revisit familiar characters in what's sure to be one of summer 2025's hottest new releases. Perfect for romance lovers, One Golden Summer is another heartfelt homage to cottage country and is an ideal beach read. Article content Article content Author Liann Zhang's debut novel is full of twists and turns as the mystery surrounding influencer Chloe VanHuusen's death unfolds. When her long-lost identical twin, Julie, steps into Chloe's glamorous world, she learns that there's more to social media stardom than meets the eye. Article content Article content Article content In this unique work of fiction, 'The Sea' is a mysterious enclave where migrants from across the ages gather. Here, a girl named Lina cares for her ailing father and learns how connected we all are as she comes to know her neighbours and fellow migrants of The Sea. Article content Article content This thrilling mystery follows Bryden and Sam, who appear to have the 'perfect life': a beautiful daughter, chic condo and supportive friends. But when she disappears out of the blue, their community is left wondering what exactly happened to the picture-perfect Bryden. Article content
Boston Globe
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
A girl and her father wash up in mysterious shelter by the sea, where they meet a trio of philosophers
Over the next few years, Lina's timeless neighbors become a chosen family. From their home in Foshan, Lina's father has brought only three volumes of a 90-book series named 'The Great Lives of Voyagers.' The books tell the life stories of historian Hannah Arendt, best known for her work ' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up With a setting as fascinating and surreal as The Sea, it's slightly disappointing that the alternating biographies of Arendt, Spinoza, and Du dominate the book. Lina's narration takes a distant backseat to the philosophers' trials, tribulations, and travels. These biographies are supposed to be instructive to Lina's quest to learn why she and her father have come to The Sea without her mother and brother. But this plotline feels largely inert because while readers are reminded of the dangers of totalitarianism and the tragic toll of forced migration and exile, Lina is like us: a passive receiver of familiar messages. Advertisement Arendt and Spinoza, in particular, take center stage. We follow Arendt through the formative traumas of her life, including her imprisonment by the Gestapo for researching antisemitism, and eventually, her perilous escape from Nazi-controlled France into Spain. Once in Spain, she travels to Lisbon and boards a ship to America, where she eventually settled and became renowned as an author and thinker. Spinoza's life story follows a similar arc. His pantheistic opinions lead to his expulsion from the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam. Spinoza's philosophies cross over into Arendt's storyline, because her work was strongly influenced by his. The backstory of Lina's father's involvement in the creation of The Sea is delivered to the reader whole, via flashback, again without Lina having to do very much. This revelatory section happens in a futuristic China where hundreds have died in a Tiananmen Square-like 'catastrophe.' Lina's father finds himself working for a company named Days and Months Technology Corp Ltd., and with a name like that, it's easy to tell that this firm is up to no good. Advertisement Lina's father's backstory only makes The Sea more fascinating, and this reader wanted to understand the mechanics of its construction. The payoff, however, stops well short of explaining the science fiction, and Lina's father's betrayal will feel expected for anyone familiar with the Cultural Revolution. The Lina storyline, already hampered by a lack of movement, gets bogged down by repetition and a penchant for mysterious philosophical statements from her neighbors that, unfortunately, recall the musings of Yoda. 'You must let go of your fear ,' Du Fu's father tells himself at one point. Meanwhile, one of the scholars instrumental to the design of the Sea says, 'The deeper you fall into the architecture of the system…the closer you come to reality.' It's a sentiment Bento and Lina will repeat. 'Time never goes missing,' Bento proclaims. 'I think the structure of reality can be no other way.' While the musicality of such sentences is pleasing, their meanings remain elusive. Fans of books like Mohsin Hamid's ' Though one can't help but admire the breadth of Thien's imagination, it's the child's story by the sea that this reader wanted more of. Advertisement Leland Cheuk is an award-winning author of three books of fiction, most recently ' THE BOOK OF RECORDS By Madeleine Thien Norton, 368 pages, $28.99
Daily Mirror
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
'After 11 rounds of IVF I became only woman to complete 3 huge challenges'
After going through 11 rounds of unsuccessful IVF, Jessica Hepburn gave her life a new focus as she turned to adventure. Little did she know her challenges would later see her make history She might not describe herself as being the 'sporty one', but Jessica Hepburn 's achievements say otherwise. As the first, and only, woman in the world to complete the 'The Sea, Street, Summit Challenge', Jessica, 54, has swum the English Channel, completed the London Marathon and summited Mount Everest – all of which have given her a newfound sense of adventure. 'I've always hated exercise. I still hate exercise. Nothing's changed. But these adventures have changed my life. I've always described myself as the arty one, not the sporty one. I wanted to be an actress when I was little, but I wasn't a very good one, so I ended up running a theatre,' she tells The Mirror. 'I like it when people say I am sporty, but if you asked any of my best friends from school, they'd say, 'yeah, she's not sporty'.' For any self-confessed exercise haters, opting to take on such huge challenges doesn't seem the obvious thing to do, but for Jessica, it came out of heartbreak. As she navigated the grief of recurrent miscarriage, unsuccessful IVF, and a relationship breakdown, the Save Me From The Waves author used adventure and plenty of episodes of Desert Island Discs as a distraction. 'The fertility journey in a nutshell started when I was 34. I'd met my partner, got an amazing job and we threw away the contraception. I thought we were going to get pregnant immediately but we didn't. After a year we went to a fertility clinic and we were diagnosed with unexplained infertility which means they didn't know what was going on,' Jessica explains. 'We went through a total of 11 rounds of IVF, which is really quite at the extreme end of the spectrum. I seemed to be able to get pregnant, but I would lose the babies and I'd have lots of miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies. It was a horrible time in my life. Not just because of all the sadness, but there was a lot of shame as well. I felt like my body couldn't do what so many women around me seemed to find easy to do. 'I didn't tell anyone what I was going through, which is very common. I was very secretive about it because you think that next month you'll join the mummy club too and you'll finally get the double lines and it's going to work out. It was a really, really dark and difficult time and it went on for a decade.' Then, at the age of 43, everything changed. After remembering a conversation she'd had with a close friend while in their late 30s, the writer and fertility advocate stopped trying for a baby. From that moment on, she decided to take on a very different challenge. 'I was with a really good friend of mine from university and we were having a meal and she said to me, 'Jessica, it's all about the number 43. If you haven't had a baby by the time you're 43, just get on with the rest of your life' because 43 is a really significant age really in female reproduction,' she says. 'Just before my 43th birthday, I went through my 11th round of IVF. It was unsuccessful again and at that moment I thought, you know what, it's not going to work. I'd lost a decade of my life and I needed to do something different. Then I had this mad idea to swim the English Channel.' Having loved swimming as a child, and having dreamed of completing the swim one day, it was a dream that Jessica hadn't thought about for three decades. 'That was the beginning of what became this adventure which changed my life and then just led to these other adventures,' she recalls. 'I hadn't ever swum in open water, I'd never run, let alone climb mountains. It just came out of all that heartbreak really and it has changed everything. That's why I'm such an advocate for the power of adventure.' Having taken on the momentous challenge with no previous experience prior to training, it's no surprise that stepping foot in France was a joyous moment for Jessica. 'It was my happy ending. I'd been longing for this happy ending, which was a baby, for so long and then I'd thrown myself into something completely different that I realised I might not be successful in and was out of my control too,' she explains. 'I was really badly stung by jellyfish all over my body, all over my face. Then it took me five hours to land. It was a really, really epic swim. I describe it as like my version of giving birth because you hear about people giving birth who go through all that pain of labour and then when they have their baby, they forget all the pain. It's euphoric. It was a bit like that. The moment I stepped foot in France, all the pain was eclipsed. It was perfect.' As well as listening to every single episode of Desert Island Discs throughout her training and adventures, something she calls its own challenge, Jessica notes that wanting was the thing that kept her going through those harder moments. 'Going through 11 rounds of IVF was my training for swimming the Channel, running the London Marathon and climbing Everest. It's a mental and physical endurance test. In a way I was doing all the training for that but also, I really wanted it,' she says. 'With Everest, I had what I described as three attempts on the mountain. The first year the mountain was shut during COVID, then I didn't summit the second time and then, I went a third time. You only keep going back if you want something. It's become a really important part of getting over the fertility journey. 'People also ask what I'm doing next, but I feel like those big adventures are done now and what's next is going to look very different. Adventure is a way of life, but I'm looking for a different type of adventure now.' As a result of her achievements, Jessica became the first, and so far only, woman to complete 'The Sea, Street, Summit Challenge'. That is, she swam the English Channel, completed the London Marathon and summited Mount Everest. 'It's amazing to have the record really. First of all, I'm the most unlikely adventurer. I also did it in my 40s and 50s. That shows people that if you really want to do something, you can. Hopefully it inspires other people,' she says. 'It is extraordinary that no other woman has done these three things. I think that is because they are very, very different and require very different skills. That makes me feel quite proud actually. 'I feel like as a midlife woman who's done a range of different types of adventures, I can champion that there is a place in the world for people who want to do different types of adventures.' Having made history with her adventures, written several books, including Save Me From The Waves, and become an activist, Jessica says that she hopes to inspire other people to turn their sadness into something better. 'It's not going to make up for the fact that I haven't had a baby. You know, it doesn't take away that sadness. That sadness is something that I will carry all my life. But it has helped. We're only here for such a short amount of time on this planet. It's a terrible world, but it's also a wonderful world. We all have sadness, all of us, and it's how you take the sadness in your life, whatever it is, and turn it into something good for yourself and other people,' she says. 'That's what I believe in and that's what I've tried to do. The sadness is still there, but I've also created an amazing life out of that sadness. It's not happened in spite of it, it's happened because of it. Without that sadness I wouldn't have done all these amazing things. Isn't that wonderful? I have this phrase you know, 'your s**t is your superpower'. Hopefully it can inspire others to turn their s**t into their superpower. That's my mission in the world.'
Time of India
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Did you know Shaji N Karun dreamt of casting Jaya Bachchan in ‘Kadal'?
(Picture Courtesy: Facebook) As Malayalam cinema mourns the loss of legendary filmmaker Shaji N Karun , who passed away at the age of 73 after battling health issues, an emotional story has surfaced—one that reveals the visionary director's long-cherished yet unfulfilled dream of bringing the film 'Kadal' (The Sea) to life. A dream called 'Kadal' According to On Manorama, soon after the story of 'Kadal' was published, Shaji N Karun met the author in Kannur and expressed an earnest desire to adapt it into a feature film. He was captivated by its depth and emotion, and plans were quickly set in motion. Location scouting took them from Ladakh to the coasts, and prominent names like Mohanlal were suggested for pivotal roles, including that of a spiritual Guru. Talk session by Shaji N Karun by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Google Brain Co-Founder Andrew Ng, Recommends: Read These 5 Books And Turn Your Life Around Blinkist: Andrew Ng's Reading List Undo Jaya Bachchan as the mother One of Shaji's most inspired casting choices was Jaya Bachchan for the role of the mother. A classmate of Shaji's from the Pune Film Institute, Jaya was moved by the English-translated script. In an interview, she said, 'When I look in the mirror, I see myself as the mother in Kadal.' Initially, the project was to be backed by Amitabh Bachchan's ABCL. But after the production company ran into financial trouble post the Miss World pageant in Bengaluru, the project stalled. Even when Jaya offered to produce the film herself, Shaji declined. The project that never was Though various actors and producers later expressed interest, including a prominent actress from Kutty Srank, Kadal never materialized. Shaji N Karun eventually shifted focus to other films, including a Hindi project titled 'Gadha'. Meanwhile, Shaji N Karun's last directorial venture was the 2018 film 'Olu' starring Shane Nigam and Esther Anil in the lead roles. The movie was praised for its stunning performance and magical realism. The script for the film was penned by T.D Ramakrishnan.
