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Showing posts from May, 2015

Small World

I was contacted the other day by someone who has commented on my blogs in the past.  They sent an email having read my post about the Rochester Sweeps Festival .They said something along the lines of "Hi.  We saw the same band in the same pub".  Now this person is just a wanderer in the blogsphere who was looking for people to talk about sobriety with.  They found my other blog then came over to here and found that post then emailed me...   what are the odds?  How many billion people are on the internet at any time?  How many blogs could they have found to read etc?  The email exchange got more bizarre when we realised that we'd actually swapped seats at one point in the event and remember each others party!  Cue that music from the twilight zone.  There's a gag in here about "in all the bars in all the world..." etc.  or should that be "in all the blogs in all the internet..."  Whole thing made me feel really connected with the wh

Rochester Sweeps Festival

Mrs F and yours truly had the chance to wander along to the Rochester Sweeps Festival on Bank Holiday Monday.  The Sweeps actually spans the entire three days of the May Day bank holiday and has to be one of the best festivals in the South East - if not all England! The history is that historically the sweeps - the young boys who climbed the Victorian chimneys to clean them out - were given May Day off as a holiday.  They combined this with an old tradition of the Jack o' the Green procession and Maypole dancing and used to parade through Rochester.  Not surprisingly it died out as the use of boys was outlawed.  But some 30 years ago a local guy decided to revive it and it's grown to be a huge gathering of Morris dancers who walk up and down the High Street picking pitches to dance in.  There is a huge amount of music about at outdoor stages and the pubs in and around the city centre. We could only get down for Monday and were planning on seeing my good friends The Wax Coll