CARNIVAL (Langudoc)

 I can't quite believe in all my years hither and thither in France I have managed to avoid 'Carnival'! This year I was in St.Pons to witness the spectacle!! And for a little town of 2,000 odd inhabitants they put on  a  fine show, lots of effort had been put into costumes and floats and the entertainment was provided by 2 sets of majorettes/pom pom girls, 2 drum bands and a brass band. The parade took the guts of 2 hours to perambulate the length of the town, during which time the road (a main through route) was closed to traffic, very lengthy queues developed on the 4 access roads but people seemed unfazed by this major obstacle and time consumption - probably being a glorious day weather ways helped.

The day culminated in the burning of the guy - or whatever they call it in France, copious numbers of sapeurs pompiers stood ready for catastrophe, dressed much as formula 1 pit stop teams, but unfortunately (for them) the fire was as uneventful as a fire can be.

But the highlight was undoubtedly the drum bands,especially these 'girls', some of them around about my age, who played for the entire duration of the parade (2 hours), whereas the other group and the band played intermittently. They were here to have a good time and by george nobody was going to stop them. The parade culminated in one of our several squares whereupon each of the musical guests did a turn, when the 'traditional' brass band completed theirs the drummer girls decided to applaud them with another bevy of drumming, then the 2nd drumming band joined forces, half an hour later the parade organizer was getting a bit frantic, there had been numerous 'time out' gestures made to head drumming lady to no avail, the brass section had stomped off back to their 'tour bus' 25  minutes ago and were probably home by now giving off to their wives. So eventually they were stopped, I had thought they'd been great but it did get to the stage where enough is ENOUGH! Battle of the twirllers and pom-poms followed,bit of an anti climax, pretty grim, when you've seen all that american razz a ma tazz on t.v. this was very definitely Sticksville, France.
The event was pretty good, quite a surprise, and a great way of avoiding cutting the grass.

And they certainly dressed for the occassion.