Skipton Gala

What a day! we spent nearly all day doing this- we were on the float, singing, chanting, waving, being gorped at. We were all utterly exhausted when we got back, but it was good fun and quite an experience. I'm glad we did it. I was quite stressed about it last night, well, nervous/excited, I suppose. But it all went relatively smoothly- I found it alright- good job it was such a colourful float- I spotted it a long way off! I managed to break the strap on my guitar, playing so vigourously. But it mended ok. It was quite noisy, being sandwiched between a live ampliflied band and an MC with a PC, so we just had to sing/play as loud as possible and couldn't really hear ourselves some of the time. I managed to play at least one whole song with one guitar string completely out of tune before I sussed out what was wrong- (someone must have been twiddling the knobs when I wasn't looking!)
Jem did all the songs with dancing and actions. Fugs sat there in bewilderment most of the time, but he was joining in the singing, if not as heartily as they had been doing at home. He thought we were going to watch it, so was a little bit confused when it was all over. Bless. Well, we did see quite a lot of the floats and stuff, but it's not quite the same effect when your'e on one yourself. We'll have to go to another gala to watch it. It's Mytholmroyd Gala in a few weeks. It was Hebden Bridge carnival today, which used to be quite impressive, the procession, I mean, and I did a fair few of those when Maeve was little, though its usually mainly a walking procession. And they have that scary elephant with the fire engines. So we missed that today, but we usually don't go as there is a music festival (rock/jazz) later on, which is better, I think, more my thing, really.
It was really nice to see all those people doing something together- a great team effort. And some wonderful costumes and props. I was quite inspired to do it again!
So there now follows a lot of photos of today.