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Crawley Mela

August 2nd, 2004 · Posted by Skuds in Life · No Comments · Life

On Saturday Jayne and I went to visit the Crawley Mela for a couple of hours. A mela is a sort of Asian cultural festival, although the Crawley one has evolved to a general multicultural festival, albeit with an Asian emphasis.

We could only manage a couple of hours because we had to open up the community centre for someone who was hiring it for a 5th birthday party for his daughter first, and then later we had to open another hall up for someone else’s 3rd birthday party. But inbetween that we managed to get to the Hawth for the mela. The Hawth is the local theatre and events like this, and the annual folk festival are held in the grounds.

Although we could not stay very long we had a good time. We saw quite a few old friends up there, saw some of the entertainments and had a bite to eat. We both got some food from the GHU tent. The GHU is the Gurjar Hindu Union who have planning permission to build a new temple and community centre in town, and are trying to raise the funds to build it. I had a vegetable curry with rice (OK, but a bit fierce for me) and Jayne had a selection of interesting stuff (Far too fierce for her) followed by a couple of Cokes to cool us down.

There was a wide variety of stalls selling all sorts of hippy/ethnic stuff, and a few fund-raising stalls for charities. I ended up, as usual, getting an extremely lively African shirt. I now have a large collection of African and Arabic clothes that Jayne won’t let me wear…

Had 22 votes gone the other way back in June I suppose I would have been at the mela as a VIP, and would have been required to wear a suit, and it would have felt like an obligation. I was quite relieved to be able to turn up in shorts and a t-shirt and just do what I felt like.

We enjoyed ourselves anyway. The only downside was the parking. All the car parks filled up pretty quickly and cars were on the grass verge for 100s of metres in every direction. I think the Hawth is not greatly served by public transport, but even if it was I suspect most people would have driven anyway. I don’t know what it will take to get people out of their cars.

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