Lord Mayor's Celebration 2016

I've lived in Norwich for 5 years this summer and have never seen the Lord Mayor's Procession. It's a really big event and I have meant to go before, it's just never worked out. But yesterday I finally went. I watched the procession then met up with Will when he finished work and we had a wander round, got some food and checked out some of the entertainment before the fireworks and heading home. It felt really good to wander about and to just come across stuff happening. I wish the street performers were there every day.





Here's some video I took of the procession, my favourite bit is probably the little Rey and watching R2-D2 go down the road was also pretty magical. I didn't take so many photos of the procession but then we went wandering.



The weather was a little all over the place but it did give us this double treat.





That bean wrap was so good.







I love fairgrounds so much. I don't go on rides but I love all the lights and colours and maybe most of all, the airbrushed paintings decorating the rides.






I love looking at all the slightly wonky versions of characters you know so well or maybe they had a theme like the underwater mural. I love anything handmade and these always have so much character. They seem to be being edged out by bad photoshop ride artwork though. I guess a lazy photoshop attempt is visually the modern comparable to a 'bad' airbrushed painting but anyone can print photos after fudging them about on photoshop. Whatever you think of the airbrushed paintings there's still a level of skill and creativity in there. I hope the airbrushing doesn't disappear too quickly, it's got so much more charm (and crosses a more acceptable line when it comes to copyright).



In this second video I collected together snippets of the fair and some of the entertainment we watched. Like I said before, wandering about and just coming across a performance made for a really good evening, I had a great time. I added a caption on the video but that guy, wow. It really was amazing to watch, it seemed so random and all over the place but you know it must have had so much work go into it. At one point he ripped his trousers off but they were only half stripper trousers so one leg came off but the other didn't so he had to take off his shoe to get the other leg off and then only had one shoe on and was in his pants the rest of the time. He pretended to smoke a flare. He put on a sombrero, filled if with nachos and threw them at us. There was a puppet and it fell apart and it's impossible to know if it was on purpose or not. He was making a soundtrack all the time too recording himself and using loops and repetition. It can't really be described, it was too amazing. Hopefully one day I'll see him perform again. My second favourite performance we saw was really very different but also awesome, the Punjabi Dance Group on the forum stage which you can probably tell I enjoyed from how much they take up of the video.




At the end of the day, once it had got dark, they set fireworks off from the castle. If you watched from city hall they have music timed to it or something but we went round to a different patch of road where there were fewer people which is often a preference of mine. We rarely go out at all and I definitely stayed up past my bedtime (lol, I'm a nanna) so I'm pretty knackered today but what are Sunday's for if not to potter about eating crisps and looking at photos from yesterday?