Blog - July 2009

In the pub after the Raft Race somebody laid down a challenge: to come up with something equally good fun, as well as being totally pointless, but very competitive. Pete, man of many talents, rose to the challenge and devised a fantastic 15 'hole' Frisbee golf course along Froggatt Edge.

It works much like regular golf. Each hole (normally a rock, tree, or something a bit bigger than a proper golf-hole!) has a starting point, and a par. Players launch their Frisbees towards the hole, throwing again from the point it lands at. There are penalties attributable to anybody with expensive Frisbees! Chris and Amy brought their dog Poppy along who made life interesting by moving people's Frisbees - not always closer to the hole! Wind, rain, and 8 foot high water-laden bracken meant it took five of us over two hours to complete the course, but we didn't lose a Frisbee.

I'd heartily recommend that anybody gives it a go. Make your own course and share it. I am sure there are plenty more - a Google search yields 321,000 results! If it's too mainstream for you, ask me about Shoe Golf, a game we invented walking back from Castle Hill boulders in New Zealand a few years back...

Photo courtesy of Steve & Louise.

Download the map and instructions.

permalink

A quick one. Been busy of late recovering from Cliffhanger and tidying up loose ends. It was a roaring success with 20,000 people there over the weekend. It rained heavily, but after we closed the site on the Saturday night and before we opened it on the Sunday morning :-). There are some cracking photos here.

More importantly, on the Tuesday after Cliffhanger I had arranged for an experimental event in the shape of a raft race from Grindleford to Calver Bridge. Exploring the river is something that had been on my wish-list since we moved in, but a combination of consecutive poor-weather summers and never finding anybody to do it with had meant I hadn't got around to it. I sent out an email to a load of friends a couple of weeks ago inviting them to turn up in teams of two with an inflatable boat. I'd expected one or two teams, and wondered whether even those would turn up when it decided to chuck it down at 6.15! I was surprised to see 10 boats in the car park when I arrived! Well, I say boats, but some were in canoes (inflatable), one team was on an airbed complete with pillow and duvet, and there were even a couple of rubber ducks! It was unanimously agreed to be a whole heap of fun and I would reccomend that anybody who lives near a river of any size organise something similar. We've promised to make it an annual event and are contemplating trying to raise some money for this. More on the disgracefully little amount of access we have to our rivers in the UK another time.

permalink

Cliffhanger is on this coming weekend. It's now in its third year and seems to be going strong. Sheffield City Council approached me having seen my website back in February 2005. I was abroad working in Jordan at the time, taking a short break from event work to work on the Iraqi Diaspora election (now that was an event and a half!), but met with a guy from the Parks and Countryside department shortly after returning to the UK. His name was Kevin Cheetham and he was head of events for P&C. He was responsible for putting on such events as The Highland Fling, Sheffield Show, After Dark and Art In The Gardens, all of which attract in excess of 10,000 people annually. He had an idea to put on a large event celebrating the outdoors, the Peak District, and the folk who live in Sheffield so that they can combine the two. I'd been brewing similar ideas for a couple of years, but had yet to take the plunge and do anything about them. We got excited when we realised that he had somebody with the expertise, contacts and drive to organise something that was otherwise out of his comfort zone, and I had somebody who had the take responsibility for, and promote locally such a large event.

That was then. We're just 5 days away from Cliffhanger III, we're not only still talking, but get on well and are continually working on how to improve the event, not just for the next year, but through until 2013. The phone has rung pretty much non-stop today - 'we need more wood for the climbing wall', 'where do we collect our passes from', 'i can't make the press event tomorrow night, something's come up' etc etc. Stressing out about any of it is counter-productive. Each call and email generally brings with it its own problems, which usually have knock-on effects on other elements of the event, but by approaching each one calmly and individually it's fairly easy to keep up-beat about them. We're three years in now, so some of the problems that we had in year one are now predictable or have even been ironed out, but there are always new ones, not least as we are always trying to develop new angles.

The biggest worry, and the one thing that stresses me out no matter how hard I try to ignore it is the weather. We live in a country with very fickle weather. Today it was hot and sunny one minute with monsoon rain the next. Weather can make or break an event. In year one we had it bad. Just enough people came to make it worthwhile putting on again. In year two things were significantly better - the sun shone most of the time and visitor numbers were doubled. The long range forecast is currently seesawing between sunny and rainy. We'll see...

permalink