19 | July | 2012 | A Mixed Bag

With the weather starting to ease, the music started up. Being on the seafront, and not far from the entertainment, we could often hear the music. With a few choirs as well as Rizzle Kicks and Twist & Pulse, we could hear quite a bit of the music. Standing on the balcony and looking out to see, there were a lot of small boats around, four or five in particular were positioned at what seemed like fixed distances apart. The tall ship that brought the torch in was also still in the Harbour.

Just after 22:00, I was sitting in my front room, discussing with my daughter what she should and could take to her mother’s when she goes to stay there for the weekend. There was a loud bang that was a sign that they had decided to go ahead with the firework display. Unfortunately, my balcony has scaffolding along the front (as do several other buildings) and as a result there was a lot of the display that I could not see. Maybe if it had not been raining earlier, I would have used the scaffolding and sat on the top.

The sounds would probably have been akin to that of seventy years ago with bombs dropping, or AAA cannons firing at incoming hostile aircraft. The scenes were beautiful last night though. Although what I did not like was the time lag between some of the displays. I would think that the fireworks had finished, and sit at my laptop looking through the photos that I had taken, and then more would start, so it was a case of whipping out the memory card and putting it back in my camera before going outside start attempting to capture again.

At one point, the castle on the cliffs behind me sent some fireworks into the skies. The boats that seemed to be equally distanced were launching pyrotechnics into the air, overlapping each other, and at one point the five rings of the Olympics were blasted into the clouds. The boats moved around whilst letting loose with their cargo creating some spectacular sites. The last firework to go off, I saw the huge ball of light, followed by a pressure in my chest and then the explosion rattled the windows, knocked something over in my daughter’s bedroom and set off car alarms.