Categories: uncategorized
Date: 21 June 2008 16:20:55
Many years ago when I was a child on holiday in Austria with my parents, we saw a sign in the village where we were staying, advertising the 'Grösste Fest Aller Zeit' which roughly translates as 'Biggest Festival of All Time'. We duly turned up in the village square on the night of the celebrations, to find a couple of rather sad stalls and possibly a bit of bunting. Since then this has been a saying in my family to describe any local festival which, as local festivals often do, turns out to be not so earth-shattering as advertised.
The saying came into my mind as I went this afternoon to the Highgate Festival, which to give it its due is a rather good festival as they go, with lots of trendy green and community-minded stalls in a leafy square, a fairground roundabout in the middle and a stage with jazz bands etc playing on it. And, being Highgate, a large number of bookstalls.
I'd gone with too little money so after I'd had a pot of salted corn which I threw away as it was so foul, a very nice meringue with no tea to go with it, an organic ice cream, and bought a poetry book and some home-made bath salts, I had run out of money. This was just the point at which I discovered where the teas were being served, one of which I could have had if I hadn't had the icecream. Never mind. The thing I'll remember is the sight of a little Down's Syndrome boy laboriously trying to hook a duck out of a paddling pond to win a prize, and his granny putting her hand over his on the stick and guiding him.
On the walk back I was waved at by a family from church who were passing in their car, and who live nowhere near Highgate. Then I bumped into two more church people, one of whom normally lives in the South West but who is staying with the other one (in Highgate) this weekend. I immediately felt a lot better about the afternoon.