Thames River Festival

Had a great weekend, doing all sorts of things, finishing with an impressive fireworks display at the Thames River Festival.

OK, so photography isn’t my main area of expertise …

I really like this festival. It has a friendly fun atmosphere that I find totally lacking at the Notting Hill Carnival. Because it is on a smaller scale you can get much closer to the action. If you’re really keen you can get right into the action, in fact. Whether it is experience that means I know where to stand, or if it is just the way things work, it is possible to get a perfect view from the kerb as the night procession goes past right under your nose.

So, what else did I get up to this weekend?

I’m sure hot sunny weather’s not normal for mid-September, but that’s what we got for both Saturday and Sunday. Perfect house-moving weather for a friend who was moving from one flat in Angel to another one just around the corner. Maybe we shouldn’t have actually spent that house-moving time sitting on the green in the sun, instead? We eventually got a couple of box carrying runs in before I had to leave to go elsewhere.

Elsewhere being another one of my friend Clare’s excellent Meet at Last parties. I don’t know where she finds all those single people to invite. Saran Rom in Fulham was an excellent chilled out venue and there were some cool people there. Shame it’s a bit of a trek to get to. A bit more dance-ier music for later on might have been nice, too. Still, you can’t have everything – Where would you put it?

I’d volunteered to do a talk on Sunday for some friends who were running a personal development workshop. I decided I wanted to do something different, and also something that would involve the participants. Just on the off-chance that listening to me ramble for an hour might be a bit much for them. So, I shamelessly lifted some Laughter Yoga from my friend Carrie who I met years ago through one of Peta Heskell’s workshops.

Rather than me explaining here, you can read all about Laughter Yoga at Carrie’s website here and here. As a result of having some great material, and being thoroughly briefed by Carrie, my talk (more of a shout/yell, actually) went very well and I was delighted with the way things worked out.

Dinner with friends afterwards with accompanying parade and firework display were the weekend’s icing on the cake.