So, that was Beltane, that was.

[akicif]

Wow. Happy, tired and somewhat hollow. After a final three days of general up and down-ness (it seems that when there's nothing to worry about, I worry over less imnportant stuff, become positively elated when things work out, and then crash down at the next problem), we were in place behind the Acropolis more or less on time, and then the World changed.

I must've done a fair few walkthroughs of the Beltane Procession, and have walked around the route another dozen or so times, but this one thing gets me every time: in the normal world, the various locations are incredibly close to each other, and even when deliberately walking slowly, walkthroughs seem to be over quite quickly. On Beltane night, though, the Hill seems enormous and it seems to take forever to move from point to point. Part of this is the crowd (at 10,500 this year, it's creeping back to pre-ticket, pre-Curfew numbers) blocking the route, but I suspect there's something about torchlight that gives a pretty good view of close-up stuff, but messes with night vision so that the dimmer distant stuff is cmpletely invisible.

My torchies - if I can call them that - were totally brilliant. They did a hell of a lot of stuff (if you want to know how hard working, there's an almost complete log of what we did over on http://www.torchbearers.org.uk) and we were almost completely ready with days to spare (hence having time to research coloured torch balls). And the team building stuff seems to have worked, too.

I lost it a little in the last minutes before we got in position - trying to deal with too many things for me to cope with at once, I found myself shouting at people.

Aargh. I'm too tired to write up the rest of the Procession right now, never mind the highlights of earlier in the week, but I'm off tomorrow, so should manage a grand catch-up.

Comments

[akicif.livejournal.com]

<Blush/> - that was indeed me. Quite out of order I was, too - crowd control should really be carried out by people without torches. The crowd were mostly well behaved up until fire point, with special prizes for idiocy at the red men attack and stage, but by the bower I was getting quite teed off.

[kaiberie.livejournal.com]

I could tell. But you had nothing to be ashamed of. ALL of my bitches about the night, were about the idiots that I encountered not the parade. The parade was beuatiful, and kudos to you AND your fine team of participants/performers/ enacters to the degree that if i can swing it, I'd love to be allowed to help next year. I'll be able to tell nearer the time though. :)