Carnival!

The 'spectacular view' from my cottage

 I drove from Cornwall to Somerset arriving at lunchtime at my empty cottage. Luckily I'd made some sandwiches before I left and devoured them hungrily with a glass of water (unfortunately, nowhere near as nice as the spring water I've been drinking for the last few weeks!) whilst sitting, rather disconsolately, on the stairs staring out at the 'spectacular views'. Once refuelled I started work by tearing up the ripped vinyl that I'd only put down four and a half years ago to reveal the previous vinyl floor covering underneath. This was stuck down with some incredibly tacky glue that adhered to my work gloves and stuck the fingers together! I was so pleased that I'd put the gloves on as I hate sticky fingers and I had no soap or detergent in the house. Under the second floor covering I found some old lino tiles! These I had to prise up with my filling trowel leaving a layer of rubbery adhesive on the concrete which was incredibly difficult to remove so, I decided to call it a day, think about it overnight and come back in the morning.

Next morning, having waved Jeni off to work I sauntered along to the local bakers to buy my lunch and then drove over to resume work at a rather more leisurely pace than I'd used when I was here a few weeks ago. First stop was my friendly builders' merchants, who actually seemed pleased to see me, where I bought a plastic spreader and grouting tool as I'd borrowed some before. I then retrieved my electric tile cutter from its storage place, set it up on the floor in the utility room and set to work. Once I'd painstakingly removed the rubber compound from the floor, using a Stanley paint scraper, it all went surprisingly well and I managed to tile the steps and put in the metal edging strips before I got fed up and went to have a cuppa with my neighbour.

She invited me for lunch the following day so I managed to cut some of the trickier tiles and lay half the entrance lobby, so that I would have something firm to stand on the next day to do the rest of the floor, before clearing up again and going for a leisurely, chatty lunch that extended well into the afternoon! The following day I cut and laid the rest of the tiles and was finished by lunchtime so went back to Wells and relaxed until Jeni came home. That only left the grouting to do on Friday, which was just as well, as it was Wells November Carnival in the evening and I wanted to be back in good time to find a parking space before the hordes descended.

One of the floats at Wells Carnival

It was the first time I'd been to the carnival for several years and it was a huge bonus just to be able to walk to a convenient spot from which to view it. We first took Jeni and David to see the carnival when Jeni was still in a pushchair, swaddled up against the evening chill in several warm layers and a blanket! We have been going sporadically ever since and it never fails to impress me the amount of work that goes into the floats. Next year's floats will already be at the planning stage and construction takes place in heavily fortified sheds dotted all over Somerset, with fierce competition between the rival clubs (to the point where espionage techniques are employed to find out what they have planned!)

We stood with a group of friends on a corner near the start/finish line (so we got to see all the floats twice), next to a pub with an outside bar serving Thatchers Gold cider and next to several burger vans – what more could we want? The parade started at about 7pm and meandered its way around the streets of Wells taking nearly 3 hours for everyone to get round. When we first used to go, there would be some large gaps between the floats as someone invariably got stuck negotiating the tight bends and narrow streets of the city centre, but these days I think they have stricter parameters governing the width of the floats although some of them are extremely long, with a tractor pulling them and a huge generator to power all the light bulbs, music and moving parts, being towed at the rear. Each float is accompanied by its walking army of marshalls to make sure that everything is safe and the public thronging the pavements don't get swept off as they glide by.

There are two types of float – the action ones where all the participants are dancing and the tableaux where all the participants have to hold statue-like poses. There are judges all the way round the route checking to make sure that the tableaux don't move right until they cross the finish line and, bearing in mind that this can take nearly three hours, their fortitude is amazing! Of course, all the dancers have to keep dancing too and some of them are only young children – they must be so tired when they get back. There are also a number of individual walking exhibits that show a large degree of ingenuity – the one I liked the best this year was a guy dressed as Superman sitting in a little motorised cart with a dummy body extending out of the back to look as if he was flying – he was hilarious! Each float blares out its music to accompany the theme chosen for the year and they all have huge numbers of light bulbs illuminating them which kick out an amazing amount of heat and create light pollution that can be seen for miles around. If you stood on Mendip you could tell which of the towns' carnivals it was that night by the eerie glow in the sky!

This year we had high hopes that the weather would stay dry but, halfway through, the heavens opened and we all got decidedly damp. Rain also tends to play havoc with the electrics on some of the floats so one came past the finish line with no music, but with its crew still manfully trying to dance so that they wouldn't be penalised by the judges, and another one had lost all their electrics and were in darkness. On the 'Dancing on Ice' tableau the wet had caused further problems – the girls in their skimpy skating costumes and posed in the same position for hours were in danger of getting hypothermia – in fact one of them had been covered with a high-vis jacket and we could hear her teeth chattering from where we were standing, but she was still stoically holding position. The following night she would have had to do it all again at Glastonbury! (Have a look at the photos here http://www.somersetcarnivals.co.uk to get an idea of the complexity and attention to detail that goes into these floats)

More tiling!

The next day I returned to normality and went back to the cottage for a final polish of the tiles and to do a few small jobs that needed doing, such as replacing the broken handle on one of the kitchen drawers and rehanging the front door curtain that I'd washed and mended. As it was such a gorgeous sunny day I couldn't resist asking my neighbour to come for a walk with me up the hill, as I haven't done that for over four years, so away we went. When we reached the top we came across a guy in a Landrover busy consulting a map. Apparently he was surveying 27 dew ponds across the Mendip Hills for the Amphibian and Reptile Conservation group who are hoping to get a grant to restore/reinstate them as important habitats for the Greater Crested Newt. We had an interesting chat with him and directed him to his next dew pond, before we climbed over the stile and made our way back down the lane that runs past my old smallholding and so back to the cottage. I still own a field on this lane (which always surprises me when I think about it) and was gratified to see that my ex has almost finished reinstating the small barn in one corner of the field, after four years of nagging!

A portion of the failed stone pipework

The next day I left Wells and drove back to Cheltenham for a few days to spend some time with my Mum. Over breakfast one morning we were talking about the fact that I now had several skills I could utilise if I ever bought a property 'in need of renovation'. I said that I might even try plumbing with these plastic pipes and fittings although I was worried that they might leak. “Oh, like the stone ones”, said Mum. “What stone ones?” I enquired. It turns out that in the early 1800s there was a quarry and works at Guiting Power, a small village on the Cotswolds, making water pipes from lumps of Cotswold stone. They hewed large blocks of stone from the quarry , shaped hexagonal pillars about 1 metre long from them and then bored out the centres to create water pipes of varying sizes which they sold to the Manchester Water Company for the city's water supply. It was only after 60 miles of pipework had been laid and joined up that the massive flaw in the idea was discovered – not only is Cotswold stone extremely porous but, under pressure from steam-driven water pumps, the pipes burst apart with disastrous results! The company went bankrupt eventually but not until £37,000 had been paid by Manchester (a figure of 3 million pounds in today's terms). Was it fraud on a grand scale or ignorance as to the strength and nature of the material? Two hundred years on and, I believe, the jury is still out on this one!

Wells Cathedral and the Bishop's Palace