The Isle of Wight ( the island just off the south coast of mainland England) has a garlic festival in August, where they present garlic in guises you never thought possible.
Somerset holds a series of evening carnivals during October/November each year. Carnial clubs are set up throughout the county and they each spend a year planning and building their carnival float. Each float has an electrical generator because the floats are lit with hundreds of coloured light bulbs. Each town has a carnival queen, and each week during the carnival season, a procession of all the floats parades through the main towns. The floats are judged and awarded prizes in each location, and as the judges are different each time, it's not unusual for there to be a different winner in each procession. People also enter the processions on foot either individually or as groups, and there's a separate judging category for those. There are some pictures of floats from 2001 (they don't seem to have last year's on their site) on: http://www.carnivalchronicle.com/carnivalphotos/2001/2001.htm One factor that became quite an issue was that the floats are pulled by tractors. Tractors doing agricultural work use red colured deisel fuel which doesn't carry as much tax as green deisel used for road use. No-on bothered about the tractors using red deisel to pull the carnival floats on those few evenings of the year until a few years ago, when some bureaucrat decided to interfere and say that the tractors had to be emptied of red deisel and filled with green deisel for each carnival night. Don't know what the final outcome of that was, but I don't think that particular bureaucrat has been heard of again. Jean in Poole To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED]
