Off to Herd the Elephant

[akicif]

Beltane's hardly over and in two and a half hours I'll be on the train down to London to help wrangle a giant elephant.

The plan is to travel down today, catch up with the friend I'm staying with (a colleague from Sony Playstation days), probably do something involving a pub (it'll be weird having smoking indoors) and then be at Battersea for the training tomorrow. I should be able to escape early enough to get to the 'Ton for a while (just where is it, these days, please?), and then Friday, Saturday and Sunday are the full-on extravaganza - mostly taking place in the area defined by Piccadilly Circus, Charing Cross, Westminster and Green Park tube stations, but Thursday's "arrival" will be somewhere else....

Friday is lunchtime through to about eightish, Saturday is nine-ish to nine or so - the longest day (whether we've energy to get to Lost Vagueness's coincidentally-named Lost Elephant event is a moot point) and then Sunday is a nice relaxing ten or so through to seven....

Some kind of after party, I believe - but not as full-on as the Beltane one, and then train back up to Edinburgh on Monday.

Just in time for the Beltane organisers' debrief (we had a Nightwatch debrief last night, and there weren't an awful lot of major incidents) which will go on Far Too Long, but will be Very Useful.

And then bed....

Comments

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

http://news.ansible.co.uk/london.html

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

"The Melton Mowbray is on Holborn, not far from Chancery Lane tube station. Address: 18 Holborn, London, EC1N 2LE; phone 020 7405 7077"

Sounds wonderful!

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Not sure about the publicity for it though, as this is the first I've heard of it :-(

I'll try to get along at some point and wave!

[fizzyboot.livejournal.com]

Good luck with the elephant, hope it doesn't decide to have a crap!

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

THis is SO cool, jealousy!

[dylan.livejournal.com]

I only saw what the elephant was all about after it had happened, the photos of it looked fantastic though, wish I'd seen it.

You'll see my Beltane photos if you look in edinburgers, edinburgh_pics or my own journal, don't think I captured any of you this time.

See you on the hill next year (even if we're both too busy to actually talk to each other)

[akicif.livejournal.com]

Nice pics indeed - are you passing the video on to Nick for inclusion in the whole thing, or was it just a Red Thing? It'd be interesting to compare the lighting when the same scene is recorded on different cameras - it's hard to measure light levels subjectively, but the last couple of years there have been bits of the video in monochrome that some folk managed to take quite good colour pictures of.

[dylan.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'm sending Nick the video, I hope he's got plenty of hard drive space, its over 18Gb in uncompressed avi format.

Some of the video is in colour where there was lots of fire around to light things up but I had to switch to b&w nightshot for lots of it, especially the redmen acrobatics as the main procession had moved on by that point. Even the colour bits are not great as the camera was struggling to focus a lot of the time and the contrast was far too great for it to cope with. The b&w is pretty grainy in the darker bits.