Holidays

Categories: greenbelt, photos

Date: 07 September 2009 16:19:19

Today is the last day of my holiday. It's been a busy but good holiday. The wedding that I blogged about a couple of week ago, was the start of it. And then we went off to Greenbelt. Being on site from the Tuesday was quite interesting - when I got there most of the racecourse was empty of tents. The big tents were all up, but none of the stalls, decorations, main stage or thousands of people were there yet! It was quite odd on Friday when so many people arrived and we were none longer camping in an empty field. I was part of the 'site vibing' team, who made and put up most of the decorations around site. Giving the site it's vibe. I had to work Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and the following Tuesday. It was good fun and satisfying when the site looked pretty, but was also hard work. I re-learnt how to drill, saw and spray paint, among other things. Nobody had ever let me loose with a spray can before! And now my boots are tinged with (Hebron) red... All the big venue signs were handmade from stratch, although on site we only finished them off - a lot of the work had been done in the month before Greenbelt. We're now hoping that they keep the venue names the same for next year! For those who weren't there, I'll try to put some photographs of signs below.

P8300040
P8300051
I spray painted both of these signs, the Festival Bowl one took an awful lot of masking tape... Oh, and the Hebron sign was actually going vertical off the ground - the photo needs to be flipped by 90 degrees to be accurate, but it's easier to read this way! There were lots of other signs but I won't bore you with all of them.

When we'd finished packing all the decorations at about 4.30 on Tuesday, I caught the train back home and spent the next few days catching up on washing, sorting through paperwork and relaxing. On Friday night we went to a lovely birthday party of a friend. It was at a local pub which has an old fashioned Skittles lane! After you'd had your three turns at trying to knock down the skittles, you had to walk down the isle and stand all the skittles back up and put the balls on the ramp that would return them to the throwing point! It was great fun. Mr B ended up with the highest individual score with 33, and I was chuffed that I'd managed to get 29. We were in two teams, but when we added up the scores for each team, both teams had ended up with exactly the same score!! Much to some people's disguntlement, the birthday girl decided to leave it at that.

Then on Saturday we packed our bags again and headed to Birmingham where we spent the rest of the day with friends of ours, who have 2 teenagers and a 7 year old, so the day was enjoyable but lively. On Sunday we said goodbye to them, and headed off to the Moseley Folk Festival. We had a lovely day, lying on the grass listening to music and relaxing. It reminded me of afternoons at Cropredy - as there's only one stage area theres no need for the long walks in between veunues that you get at Greenbelt, and there's much more chance to chill out with a book. It was a much smaller festival than both Cropredy and Greenbelt, so it felt more intimate. Given the main stage's requirements at Greenbelt, it's difficult to then make it into a space where people can take picnic blankets, chairs and a book. I have seen people doing this at the main stage at Greenbelt, but a more intimate space, like the one at Moseley, is much more welcoming to this activity. I was also impressed with little things at Moseley - like they gave away a free CD with 15 songs from the artists from the weekend with the £5 programme. And the music of course was good, I especially enjoyed Cara Dillon. The only real crititism that I had was that there didn't seem to be quite as much energy in the audience as I'd expect. Often when artists tried to interact with the audience and get them to make a bit more noise, the audience didn't really respond. Maybe this comes from the more chilled out atmosphere, I don't know... Or maybe it livened up more after we'd left - we had to leave towards the end of Cara's set as we had to drive home. Photographs of Moseley Folk might have to wait a few days - they're still on my camera!

Anyway, it's been a very good holiday. Just hoping that work isn't *quite* as busy as it was in the week before my holiday...