Sweeps Festival 2013

I generally try to have a look-in at our annual Sweeps Festival in Rochester, and this year's (the 33rd) was no different.

The festival stems from the practice in a bygone era of the boys who were sent up chimneys to clean them having a special free day where they could have a great time away from their miserable day-to-day lives. These days, it is more a celebration of the sweeps, so boys dress up as sweeps and make themselves 'look dirty' as if it were a working day for them (I imagine they originally washed off the grime for their day out).

In reality, it is one of our slightly less interesting events, as essentially it's just a load of Morris sides performing in the street. In fact, it is believed to be the biggest congregation of Morris men (and women) in Europe, apparently with more than sixty sides taking part. Yes, there are the usual fairground, ice cream vans and burger bars in the Castle Gardens, but the event itself is rather one-dimensional.

Don't get me wrong: I am quite a fan of the Morris, and have been for many years, following a couple of sides in my home town of Wimbledon for example. It's just that it doesn't seem to be sufficient somehow, even with the dressing-up that local people do at the drop of a (Victorian) hat.

It is therefore very gratifying to find that just about all of historic Rochester was more-or-less packed, as least as much as we get during the summer Dickens Festival. The warm sunny weather will have contributed to this, but on a bank holiday weekend when many people go away for these few days it was a remarkable success story, finishing later today.

I didn't take any kind of camera with me, still or video, as others always do, and several video clips of this year's event have already appeared at YouTube, such as this rather well-produced one by a John Martin...

Snow Festival

Japan has been mounting these Snow Festivals I have recently been referencing, again in Sapporo, for a long time. This year's was the 64th, and here are just some snippets of and from the 2013 event (this is not the original video of the event that I embedded here, but that one seems to have some accessibility issues, so I've now found another).

Surprising? Perhaps; but we in Britain tend to underestimate the Japanese cultural side of life, being a lot more familiar with their technology and not having any particular reason to see beyond that. Maybe we should...


Also coping with the weather is the delightful Snow Miku tram...

Will Adams Festival 2012

I was back at this year's Will Adams Festival, nowadays held in Gillingham Park, after missing last year's as I was then still not well enough after my hospitalisation.

It was the same of event as in previous years – naturally, as the story is a part of our history and is thus unchanging. I had mixed feelings about the change in venue: it works well generally in the park, but lacks the ready-made indoor facilities of what was then called the Black Lion Centre when it was held there. Now it has to be emulated in tents and on the grass, which seems to work okay.

Anyway, I shan't say any more, but let the photographs I took (this is a little over half of them) speak for themselves...