First of all, let's ignore the signing up ages in advance and practicing. However, for that many people with fire on sticks we would need to have a truly enormous health and safety meeting (I suspect that Tynecastle or Easter Road might be too small) and a similar-sized venue would need to be taken over for the spraying of people's clothes with the obligatory fire-retardant.
No kids and animals of course - this definitely means no pushchairs.
Lots more stewards, of course, and if there weren't going to be enough on the night, the organisers would be stuck phoning round all their friends until they'd sorted the numbers (but, as these organisers' friends include the council and the Police, the number of stewards needed would soon be cut).
No alcohol - can't mix fire and alcohol, oh no. Similarly, no glass to be brought onto the Hill.
But the biggest difference of all is that the people organising the Torchlit Procession don't have to spend a chunk of the run-up clearing away Beltane's mess, whereas every bloody year, it seems, the ruin of the "longship" leaves its cargo of nails (someone's been misreading Norse mythology, obviously), hinges, and chunks of random burnt metal for the Beltane performers to tidy up lest someone should get an involuntary tetanus-flavoured piercing.
That said, off I go - still a sucker for fire onna stick!
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