A LIGHT ON THE FESTIVAL

It might be easy to mock when a flyer for the local September arts festival comes through your door, and the content doesn’t quite seem as thrilling, diverse or entertaining as some of the larger and more well known arts festivals that you might have heard of. I mean it’s hardly Edinburgh, is it, or even Hay-on-Wye…? It probably wouldn’t even cause the stout denizens organising the equivalent event in Buxton to tremble in their boots, but, bless them, they’re trying to make things more exciting around this forgotten little town, but reading through the list of exciting arts-related events happening once more during this year’s version on the familiar theme, I couldn’t help but wonder to myself how many of them would have been going on anyway but have somehow got themselves lumped in with the notion of a festival to make everything sound just that bit more exciting.

Ah well, I suppose it all makes for extra publicity for all the events featured, so it can’t really do much harm to any of their prospects for getting an audience.

Lanterns seemed, rather unsurprisingly, to feature strongly, but then they always seem to.

In fact when I mentioned that the festival events flyer had arrived, the first question was “Will there be lanterns?” to which the answer is, as always, “Yes, of course there’ll be lanterns” and, in a few short weeks time, the air no doubt will be alive with flickering flames as those very lanterns drift quietly, majestically and hopefully safely across the night air, unless there is torrential rain, that is. I do wonder whether, over the many years they have featured, any have drifted into a barn or a haystack as the “oohs” and “aahs” of the watching dozens have transformed into frantic diallings of 999.

You have to accept that lanterns play a large part in the whole event. The first four things listed in the pamphlet involve lanterns. Presumably this persistence implies that there haven’t yet been any lantern related health and safety disasters in the past, and so they will continue to feature strongly until the lantern-maker in chief decides to retire or, if they pass on their skills to another generation, possibly forever. There’s lantern making training, lantern workshops, a lantern procession and a workshop to make the lanterns to light the lantern procession.

We are, apparently, very big on lanterns hereabouts.

The second question asked after “Will there be lanterns?” tends to be “Are they fish lanterns?” to which the answer is more ambiguous. The theme this year is “nature” which makes me suspect that indeed, as in previous festivals, fish lanterns may feature quite heavily.

I rather suspect that someone is rather keen on the concept of teaching people how to make fish lanterns and somehow each year, they are encouraged to do so once more. Perhaps it really is the only collective creative activity that is possible in these here parts, or maybe there really is only one person hereabouts who is interested enough in getting people involved in doing anything much at all in a community spirited kind of a way, and they just happen to be a lantern maker. Either that, or the festival is actually just an annual one person vanity exercise for someone who owns a lantern shop.

But it’s not really fair to mock. After all, I’ve never attended one single festival event in all the years it has been going, and I’m sure it makes a lot of people, especially those with children to amuse very happy indeed, and I’m sure the flickering flames drifting through the autumnal evening makes more than one special memory.

Sadly, the rest of the events listed don’t exactly excite me very much or make me circle any dates in particular on my calendar, but not much gets me out of the house anyway these days. Ramblers’ walks, knitting installations and celebrations of the local football club hardly seem likely to stimulate the likes of me and seem aimed at an age group much older than I currently am. An open day at the allotments or an evening listening to the brass band won’t find me sitting snugly in their demographic either, as do very few of the church based events or the alternative health clinic.

It is after all an eclectic list. “Apple-focused fun” in the community orchard will probably not be Mac-related. Songs of Praise do not really tempt me, and I suspect there’d be much thanks for that raised up to the heavens by anyone who ever heard my attempts at singing. A tour of the hydropower scheme doesn’t strike me as being particularly “arty”, although the sciences are well-represented by “Exploding Custard” and other “awesome” do-it-yourself science experiments. A talk about lost railways and an evening hearing someone playing the 1914 Binns organ stuck out amongst the whist drives, book chat, craft shops, quiz nights and themed evenings at the restaurant, but all-in-all it sounds a pretty low-key affair.

I did wonder, just for a second, as to whether I should try to present one of my plays next year, but decided that I was hardly likely to motivate myself towards such a thing, never mind anyone else.

Oh, it would be so easy to mock. Maybe it would be too easy to sit around contributing nothing myself and mocking all that effort being made by others, and that energy put into it. After all, what do I do to enrich the world around me? Well done to them for trying. Well done to them for succeeding, and shame on me for all my failures.

Again.