Eat My Gazebo!

Arkfest 2005 was a fabulous success - the full story must be left to others to tell, complete with music and photographs. As a taster for the full account, here's the brief highlights of my experience as a gazebo-erector (yes, really) and carpark attendant early in the day. The gazebos were a triumph of improvisation over engineering: somehow the instructions leaflet hadn't been packed up last year, so I was faced with the problem of working out how to put them together from first principles. The collection of rods, poles, plastic joints and nylon sheeting had obviously come from the same school of comedy design that brought you the deckchair, but eventually, after many jokes about single-handed erections, I got it up (several times) - with the help of the Renaissance Man and his friend the The Mighty God Vulcan The Smith, whose ornamental braziers were by now adorning the arena of the Arkleby Bowl. So, pausing only to don my fetching fluorescent yellow jacket adorned with the words You've Been Nicked, I made my way over to the adjacent carpark to amuse myself directing traffic.
This harmless entertainment eventually caused me to revise my opinion of humanity. The guests' mission, had they chosen to accept it, was to park their cars as close to the lefthand hedgerow of the field adjoining the Renaissance Couple's garden as they were able to contrive. Somehow it all went horribly wrong, and at least two-thirds of them drove their cars merrily over the bumps ruts and cowpats of the field to park as far towards the distant right-hand side of the field as they could manage. I'm still trying to work out what went wrong . . . the proceedings were lent an air of exoticism by the appearance of someone in a pirate's tricorn hat whose Cumbrian accent kept modulating mid-sentence into an alarming Devonish burr - presumably because he thought it was still International Talk Like A Pirate Day (hat-tip - Lex). By this time Banjaxed's gorgeous rendition of Every Time You Walk In the Room was wafting over the tree-tops, so I abandoned my post for the best day of music, food, drink and good company you could imagine. The plans for Arkfest 2006 should be starting . . . about now.