Carols and Armed Guards

Leapt out of bed at the crack of half ten, I deserve it. Loudly unloaded the story of last night's Scouting victory to a slightly dozy Jof.

But the main activity of the day was a rehearsal for the 3 days of street performance I'll be doing next week. We all gathered at the theatre (Sydney kindly giving me a lift) and in the end all we did was sing carols because we'll be doing that every morning to serenade the queue of lucky punters before we start the main performances.

The theatre director said that every year the Festival gets bigger by 8000 people so we could be seen by 60,000 humans, 5 TV stations will be sending camera crews, various radio stations and newspapers and stuff will be sending reporters and of course a gazillion normal humans will be wielding their cameras, so if we play our cards right, we could be famous!

Also they're opening up a bit more of the dockyard to the Festival and so we should expect to see lots of heavily armed guards dotted around, because it's a working naval base and those naughty ISIS johnnies would just love to get one of their special rucksack-operatives past the bag search. A few years ago, somebody left behind their lunchbox with a cheese sandwich in it and that set off the sniffer dogs and the bomb squad took the lunchbox outside and blew it up, too much chili sauce probably.

And we've got a new route for the parade and security passes and our green room where we have lunch will be guarded and it just keeps on getting better, especially as we're old hands now having done it last year.

At going-home time, we got a cryptic message about doing a hostage exchange in the D-Day museum car park, so we went along to see what the fuss was about. The storms last night must have coincided with high tide again because just like 2 years ago, the sea had washed the beach right up onto the road and knocked out lots of the giant concrete blocks holding the world together. A lone Spitfire flew past, checking out the damage, because he doesn't care if the seaside road is closed in 3 places due to all the shingle, sand, seaweed and driftwood all over the road.

And the bandstand by Henry the 8th's Castle was flooded again, looking serene in the evening light. Sydney and I are the 2 little figures on the right. All the trees are naked and the roads are covered in leaves: funnily enough, it's due to rain heavily again tonight.