Busy Weekend - Hay-on-Fire

I did have various things planned for the weekend - I was going to go into Hereford for the Climate Change Hallowe'en Carnival, and there was a Fairtrade committee meeting, for instance - but all that went by the board when my sister phoned to say she was coming down for the weekend with her husband and my little nephew.
I don't get to see them that often.

So we went for dinner to Kilverts, and greatly enjoyed the steak and ale pie (and James ate almost a whole pizza! He's only four.).
In the background, there was a continuous loop of short films on the big TV screen. Hay-on-Fire 2007, the beheading of King Richard, Kilvert's beer festival, and the biker wedding, most of the films being done by Marches TV.

They couldn't stay for the whole of Hay-on-Fire - they had to be back home for Sunday morning - but they did get to see the afternoon entertainment. It started with Japanese drumming in the Buttermarket. The group is from the Abergavenny area, and the leader said it was only their second public event! They were very good - and there was even a real Japanese lady drumming with them. James sat near the front of the crowd with his hands over his ears.
There was also a parade of giant costumes made by various local schools - we'd been in Booth's Bookshop earlier, and seen two of the models, a witch and a wizard, on the big table upstairs. They had two days of workshops in there for the children to make them.
Then there was Morris dancing, with a tiny girl in a pink frock dancing away to the side of them. James enjoyed the dances where they banged sticks together. One of the dancers rather enjoyed dancing off into the back of Llewellyn's shop - and the other way into the British Legion - during one of the dances they did outside Kilvert's, re-emerging just in time to join the rest of them as the dance continued.
There were some good costumes around, too - I was particularly taken by the black cloak with thick gold embroidery, worn with a black feathered hat.

I missed the procession going through town in the evening - I was having tea with my sister just before they went home, already in my Goth dress and cloak. I caught up with the tail end of the procession by the church. The road was solid with people right down to the track to the Warren, and the track to the Warren was solid with people all the way down as well. I heard a few grumbles at the slow pace of things - until we all got to the liquid mud puddles which had been causing the bottleneck.
I got a drink at the (expensive) licenced bar - XOX Organics were there too, and an ice cream van, and a couple of other vans - and joined the back of the crowd overlooking the bend in the river where everything was set up. I thought at first that I was at the back of a crowd that was three or four deep - until I looked down the slope and realised that the crowd was actually about twenty or thirty deep!
The Japanese drummers were there, in a tent, and an a capella choir who sang 'Money - That's What I Want'. There seemed to be a money theme - there were burning dollar signs, and a pound sign on the chest of the wicker man that was burned near the end. There was a samba band, and fire poi (swinging flames around on the end of pieces of chain) and cross-dressing Morris men (I spotted Derek Addyman in a gorgeous black sequinned costume).

The fireworks were AWESOME!
They must have blown three quarters of their budget on the rockets, and they were WOW!

Hay-on-Fire's displays are always good, but I think the last time I saw anything like this was at WorldCon 87 in Brighton, when the fireworks were let off from Brighton Beach, and could allegedly be seen (and heard) in France.

Then there were the after-display parties around town, and bunches of costumed people wandering round.
A man in a sombrero asked me if I'd like to come to Cairo with him, while I was walking the dog!
A man outside Kilvert's, seeing my costume, said "If you're off to celebrate a black Satanic mass, we're coming too!"
"Damn!" I answered, "and I forgot the black cockerel!"