I went to Sheffield Fayre yesterday, at Norfolk Heritage Park in the South-East of Sheffield. It was a fab day, with good community information, craft stalls, free energy-saving lightbulbs (had we got there earlier), and the most amazing prize flowers and vegetables.
Some were huge, others beautiful, some were even perfection. Many were breathtaking and some were odd, or even comical.
I absolutely loved it.
Except the whole battle re-enactments business. Bang bang bang. Bang bang. Bang bang bang. Bang. Bang.
Grown men - hundreds of them - marching around with big fuck-off guns. It was like a playground pretend scene, but made up of adults, in dress-up costume, glorifying battles, wars and death weapons.
Nice.
And so many bangs! At one stage as we were sitting on the grass and cannons were going off a few hundred yards away, a young boy was crying to his dad about how it was scaring him. I was rather tempted to tell him it was scaring me too.
And as if the pretend armies (from the Romans to WWII) weren't enough, we were faced with real armies too! Providing information about joining up, combined with fun rides for the kids. Yeah, get recruiting at a community park fun day, great stuff.
And I didn't donate any money to the army's Benevolent Fund. I didn't feel any benevolence towards them, mainly because the army shows benevolence to no-one.
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1 comments:
Perhaps hearing the bangs will put off any small children that may have been tempted to join up? If you listened to the commentary they were quite keen to stress the horrific nature of 19th century warfare as well. The big bangs were only to be heard during the ACW skirmish anyway, and the rest of the time it was Crazy Frog at full blast from the fairground that was somewhat more irritating. By the way, did you talk to any of the re-enactors? Most of them are genuinely interested in trying to understand the history of their particular period, and understanding why wars happened is the first step to avoid repeating them.
As for me, I prefer hitting things with swords ... ;-)
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