Following the Pied Piper's fiery tongue to the hungry fish...

Hello one and all! Since writing about Ireland is going to take a substantial amount of time and I just have a little window of writing time tonight, I am going to tell you about what we did tonight instead. Our Irish adventures can wait until another day. And I promise that the title of this post will make sense by the end of this!...

Tonight we went to the Horsham Town Centre Festival. This is an annual three-day festival that I found out about when looking on the net for upcoming events a few weeks ago. Horsham is about 15 minutes south-west of Crawley, and it's also where we go for meetings.

We got to Horsham a little after 7pm and found a carpark in the middle of town. (Thankfully a nice couple came up and told us we didn't need to pay for parking after 6pm, just in time to stop us blindly shoving our pennies into the “pay and display” machine!)

We then followed the music and people to a street corner where a lively band was playing up a storm. They were excellent!! Tongues of Fire, which we later learnt their name to be, is an eight-piece stand-up male jazz ensemble consisting of a baritone sax, alto sax, two trumpets, trombone, tuba, snare drum, and a bass drum. The bass drum was actually more like a mobile drumkit hanging from the drummer's neck, as it had cymbals and a woodblock attached to the top of it! The group had red and green Christmas lights entwined around most of the instruments, and the baritone sax player also doubled as the conductor, frequently abandoning his playing to walk back and forth in front of the other seven and wave his arms enthusiastically. Anyway, they were absolutely brilliant!!

After a while, the band suddenly began to walk, still playing their infectious music, and, like children following the Pied Piper, the crowd followed them a short distance through the streets of Horsham until we reached an area known as “the Forum”. There, they wove amongst the crowd, still playing relentlessly and following the long-haired, long-jacketed Head Piper with the barry sax, until they ended up on a small stage and finished with a magnificent display of rhythmic talent by the two drummers.

Tongues of Fire then disappeared and “Feeding the Fish” took to the stage! This was, as described by the festival website and read out by the radio guy who introduced them: “a high-energy stage-show where juggling and movement are performed in partial light with illuminated clubs and balls, changing brightness and strobing, emitting a spectrum of colours in perfect synchronization to a dramatic soundtrack”! This was absolutely fantastic – a choreographed performance by a man and woman with unbelievable juggling skills. Instead of balls, they used clubs that constantly changed colour and light sticks that made shapes as they were twirled around in the darkness (due to the programming of the strobing lights inside the sticks) – flowers, fish, stars, hearts, etc! They even juggled with the woman standing on the man's shoulders. Brilliant!!! (Bruce and Curtis, getting any ideas?)

Afterwards, we had tea at a nearby restaurant where the friendly man who carried our meals out stayed and told us lots of places “off the tourist trap” that we should visit whilst over here. He wants to go to Australia someday and travel from Sydney to Cairns, so he hopes someone in Australia will be kind enough to give him similar inside advice. So, Aussie friends and rellies, make sure you look out for him! :)

We then walked back to our car for the drive home, passing en route a merry-go-round, tea-cup ride, ferris wheel, and a number of show-type stalls such as hula hoop tossing and tin duck shooting. All in all, it was a thoroughly pleasant evening and a very enjoyable first-English-small-town-festival experience. Goodnight!