Margate Kite Festival
We took a trip down to Margate yesterday, to the kite festival. Last year we got there at about 3.00pm only to find an empty beach and not a kite in sight. The weather was awful, strong winds – which, ok, could have been an advantage – but there was also a lot of rain, and it was freezingly cold. It seemed they’d all gone home early and I can’t say we blamed them.
But yesterday was wonderful. A balmy breeze, strong enough to be good for kites but not so strong it was annoying, blue skies with enough cloud to be interesting, and warm sun. The star of the show was a huge octopus kite. We walked along the beach to get to the arena, so we saw it first from the back and it looked as if some war-of-the-worlds-style alien creature was about to take over Margate.
From the front, and a little deflated, it looked a lot less threatening:
We had just missed a giant gecko, but there was a parrot:
I think my favourite was this little red horse. Although it does look cute in the photo, you need to see it in motion to get the full effect as the movement of the wind made it look as if it was realistically galloping along. Sometimes I really wish my camera did video.
But if monkeys are more your thing, you could have had this one – and a banana. (And they were trying to inflate a giant lobster as we left.)
Some of the fancier ones never made it off the ground. This one looked fantastic, but floundered around getting nowhere.
Sometimes, though, simpler can be better and there was something very fresh and appealing about this plain white kite against the blue of the sky.
The next one wasn’t flown while we were there, but it looks amazing just sitting on the ground. It was huge and the colours were utterly gorgeous.