Categories: uncategorized
Date: 11 August 2007 20:43:43
Ken recently wrote about the rules of small towns. There was one small summer event he missed out in this, the local carnival. The lower down the scale the more seriously the carnival is taken (probably because there are no other historic festivals, events which can take presidence over it).
So it was that in "No-where-ville on sea", a town with a large number of charity shops, junk shops, estate agents and co-ops, that today was carnival day. This link takes you to the home page of our carnival and as you can see it is all taken rather seriously. For those who are not familiar with these events they involve a parade of marching bands, beauty queens and obsure floats which often involve men in drag, and children dressed as animals advertising and celebrating the local community groups (such as roller hockey team, youth theatre group, etc, etc).
Along the carnival route you find a mixture of youths (with obligatory larger can), young children and third agers sitting on any available wall, bench or other space they can find throwing coppers to the people collecting for charity and generally ignoring the men selling rather expensive balloons and furry stuff on sticks.
As for me, well I was stationed outside a town centre church filling cups with squash and trying not to laugh at the way people really struggled with the idea that they were being offered something for free.