Bristol Harbour Festival

I enjoyed the Bristol Harbour Festival last night. We popped down for couple of hours to stroll round Bristol’s magnificent old harbour to take in the sights and smells. And that was just our fellow visitors.

Without cheating and using Mr Google, I am not entirely clear what the festival is for, other than to celebrate with alcohol and food, although these are good enough reasons in themselves There were thousands of people shuffling round, people of all ages and widely differing levels of original gravity coursing through their veins.

The mainly small boats tied up by the harbour walls seem to be of less than secondary interest to most people. Personally, once I have seen one small cruiser, I have seen them all, but that is not to denigrate those who sat on deck, quaffing their G&Ts, pretending not to be cold as the chill wind blew up the river!

I was particularly interested, you will not be surprised to learn, to find somewhere to drink. There were numerous ‘Zero Degrees’ pop up pubs, but they were mainly rammed so we took a punt on the Wetherspoons, which we expected to walk into and then walk out of because of the sheer numbers queueing for drinks. How wrong we were. I was served in an instant – Exmoor Gold, if you must know – and we stood outside to people watch and breathe in the smell of other people’s cigarettes. (It really is time to ban cigarettes from around the harbour. Sorry if you smoke, but you cannot avoid the smelly smells and these days you should be able to.)

And the food – much of it was to die for and if we had consumed a great deal of it, we might possibly actually died for real. Luckily, we had already had our tea before we came out and were not tempted to buy a jumbo bag of Churros dipped in thick, runny chocolate, but it was a close thing. And everywhere you looked, there was traditional Bristolian food from Thailand, Portugal, Spain and Mexico. The smells were sublime, but I just stuck to the beer.

The Harbour Festival is not quite like the continental cafe culture. There’s still an element of drinking as much as possible in a short space of time, but it does feel different from the “let’s go out and get bollocksed” tradition of a normal Bristol weekend. Although there were thousands of people walking incredibly slowly, many of them talking extremely loudly, there was no sense of edge in the atmosphere. Queen Square was a seething mass of young bodies, listening to live bands on the stage, the city really came alive. I am sure as the night wore on, the usual Friday night fisticuffs occurred, giving a sense of normality to the occasion, but for one lovely weekend Bristol is seen at its most beautiful.

We may have an abysmal public transport network, along with near permanent gridlock, we may have no arena and we may not have top flight sports teams (or stadia), but we have got the harbour and this weekend we know how to use it.