The Last Saturday in July

Kirkby Sands has nine thousand people, one road in, and one festival, which happens on the last Saturday in July.

The theme changes every year. Gizem, who has organized the festival for six years, chooses it in January and tells nobody until the posters come back from the printer. This year the theme is the sea, which was also the theme in 2019, and in 2016, and in every other year when nobody sent her a better idea.

First, at seven in the morning, the high street is closed and the fish van is moved off it. This takes longer than anything else that happens that day.

By nine the stalls are up, in an order that never changes: jam, then second-hand books, then the photography competition in the church hall, then a table where the primary school sells small painted stones for fifty pence each. The photography competition has three subjects — boats, dogs, and the pier — and the same man has judged it since 2011, because he won it four times and everybody got tired of that.

Then, at noon, the brass band plays for an hour. The musicians are mostly over sixty, and mostly related to one another.

At two, the parade goes down the high street and comes back up it, which takes eleven minutes. At the front is the whale, a sculpture of driftwood and blue rope that the secondary school rebuilds every June, because the sea takes the old one every winter.

After the parade the cakes are judged. The prize is a small silver cup which lives in the winner’s kitchen for a year and is then handed back, slightly cleaner. Gizem has never entered.

Finally, when it is dark enough, a film is shown on the white wall of the boat shed. There have been eleven of these, including one year when it rained so hard that everybody watched from inside their cars with the headlights off.

Then the stalls come down, and everyone who ran one sits along the sea wall and eats whatever didn’t sell: jam on cold toast, half a tray of cake, the wrong sandwiches. That hour is not on the poster. It is the hour Gizem plans the rest of the day around.