On Sunday last week, my town had a small spring festival. It was in the park near the river. Many families came. The children played games. There were three food stalls. We ate small cakes with fruit and drank hot tea. A small band played guitar music. My grandmother danced for the first time in many years. It was a very happy day. Next year, I will help my mother to make the cakes.
The village of Solano held its annual harvest festival last Saturday. About six hundred people came, more than last year. The festival was in the central square, which was full of stalls and small stages.
This year, ten farmers brought their best fruit and vegetables. There was a small competition for the largest pumpkin. The winner, Tomas Garcia, said: "I have been growing vegetables for thirty years. This is my best year. The summer was hot but the rain came at the right time."
Local children sang traditional songs in the late afternoon. Many older people sang with them. Maria, who teaches at the village school, said: "The children practised for two months. They were nervous, but they did very well. I am very proud of them."
The festival ended at ten in the evening with a small fire and a free meal for everyone. Next year, the village hopes to add a second day.
The town of Solano celebrated its annual harvest festival last weekend, attracting around 1,500 visitors over two days. The festival, which has been held for more than a hundred years, has grown rapidly since 2021, when a regional television channel filmed the opening procession.
The festival began at midday on Saturday with the procession through the main street. Around 200 local children, dressed in traditional clothes, walked from the church to the town square. The square had been decorated with flowers and small lanterns. Twelve food stalls offered regional specialities, including a particular kind of bread that is made only at this festival.
The town's mayor, Petra Lopez, said the festival was the heart of the town's year. "We are a small place," she said. "This is what we have. We have to be careful with it." The council had spent more on safety this year than ever before.
Not everyone is happy about the changes. Carlo Mendez, 76, has attended every festival of his life. "There are more visitors," he said. "That is the truth. Some of them know the meaning of what they are seeing. Some do not. The dance at the end is the same dance. But the people watching are not always the same people."
Local businesses have benefited from the bigger crowds, but some residents have stayed home during the busiest hours. The mayor said the council would begin a consultation in the autumn about how the festival should grow. "It belongs to the people who live here," she said. "They will decide."
The procession returns next year on the same weekend. Carlo said he would be there. "I always am," he said.
When the procession of children in white shirts and red sashes set out from the church of San Giuseppe at five past midday on Sunday, the small town of Verola was, for the next eight hours, twice the size it usually is. By two o'clock, the food stalls in the central square had served their first round; by five, the dance troupe from the next village had taken the main stage; by ten in the evening, the closing fireworks had drawn an audience that, by police estimate, came to around three thousand. The figure is broadly consistent with last year's, and four times that of 2019. The festival, by every available measure, was a success. The honest version of why it was a success, and at what cost, sits between the celebratory account and the warning account, and refuses to be tidied into either.
The mayor of Verola, Anna Reis, was candid about the change. "We have spent more than ever before," she said. "On safety, on cleaning, on temporary toilets. The figure is now four times what it was when I started this job. I am not complaining. I am explaining what growth costs." The town's permanent population is 1,400. The weekend's audience has been roughly twice that for three years running. The mayor's office has begun a public consultation about whether to introduce a maximum daily figure for next year.
Not everyone is in favour. Sergio Bellini, 79, has organised the procession volunteers for over forty years. "There were always more visitors after the war," he said. "The difference now is that the visitors are not from the next valley. They are from everywhere. They take photos. They do not always know what they are seeing. I do not blame them. But I will say that what they are seeing is not always what we mean by it." The careful phrasing is one I have heard before in conversations of this kind, in towns of this size, from people of his generation.
A particular older song — sung in regional dialect, slow, repeated three times — had been removed from this year's programme. "It is being looked at for next year," an organiser said when pressed. The phrasing was, when I asked who had made the decision, indirect. The mayor, asked the same question, said she did not know how the decision had been taken, and that she would find out. The honesty of the second answer is the kind that local politics needs more of, and that gets less of than it should.
The procession ended, as it has ended for many years, with the children placing flowers at the foot of the cross. Many of the visitors took photographs. Many of the older residents did not. The two groups were not in conflict. They were sharing the same square, on the same afternoon, doing slightly different things. The festival the world will watch online tonight and the festival Verola will remember may, by next year, be two slightly different events. Whether this is a problem, and what kind of problem it is, will depend on whom you ask, and on what the council does between now and the next consultation, and on whether the song returns to the programme.
When the procession of children in white shirts and red sashes set out from the church of San Giuseppe at five past midday on Sunday, the small town of Verola was, for the next eight hours, twice the size it usually is. By two o'clock the food stalls in the central square had served their first round; by five, the dance troupe from the next village had taken the main stage; by ten in the evening the closing fireworks had drawn an audience that, by police estimate, came to around three thousand. The figure is broadly consistent with last year's, and four times that of 2019. The festival, by every available measure, was a success. The first thing to say about a festival of this kind is that it is, simultaneously, three different events: the event the people who organise it have intended, the event the people who attend it have come for, and the event the people who live there have always understood it to be. The article that fails to hold all three in mind is going to mistake one of them for the whole.
The mayor of Verola, Anna Reis, was candid about the change. "We have spent more than ever before," she said. "On safety, on cleaning, on temporary toilets. The figure is now four times what it was when I started this job. I am not complaining. I am explaining what growth costs." The town's permanent population is 1,400. The weekend's audience has been roughly twice that for three years running. The mayor's office has begun a public consultation about whether to introduce a maximum daily figure for next year. The framing — three options, one of which is not really an option — is honest and within the normal range of competent municipal politics. It is also a piece of political work that begins the conversation on her terms, before the worse outcomes elsewhere become the example.
Not everyone is in favour. Sergio Bellini, 79, has organised the procession volunteers for over forty years. "There were always more visitors after the war," he said, in a tone that suggested he had been asked the question often. "The difference now is that the visitors are not from the next valley. They are from everywhere. They take photos. They do not always know what they are seeing. I do not blame them. But I will say that what they are seeing is not always what we mean by it." The careful phrasing — 'I do not blame them' — is the kind I have heard before in conversations like this one, in towns of this size, from people of his generation. He is not naive about the genre into which his words will be placed.
A particular older song — sung in regional dialect, slow, repeated three times — had been removed from this year's programme. "It is being looked at for next year," an organiser said when pressed. The phrasing was indirect. The mayor, asked the same question, said she did not know how the decision had been taken, and that she would find out. The honesty of the second answer is the kind that local politics needs more of, and that gets less of than it should. It is also the kind of honesty that commits her to a public response of some kind, since having identified the problem in print, she will be expected to address it. Whether she does will be one of the small tests of how the conversation she has begun will actually go.
It is worth saying, as a paragraph the celebratory account would not include, that the people whose work makes the festival possible — the cleaners, the temporary security, the council staff working an extra shift — rarely appear in reports of this kind. They are, on the whole, willing. They are also, for the duration of the weekend, doing the festival as work while everyone around them is doing it as celebration. The article that does not at least register this division of labour is taking the easier path through harder ground. I have not interviewed any of them for this piece, and that is its limit, not its range.
The procession ended, as it has ended for many years, with the children placing flowers at the foot of the cross. Many of the visitors took photographs. Many of the older residents did not. The two groups were not in conflict. They were sharing the same square, on the same afternoon, doing slightly different things. The festival the world will watch online tonight and the festival Verola will remember may, by next year, be two slightly different events. I am one of the outsiders, and what residents are willing to say to outsiders next year will, in part, depend on what writers like me have said about this one. There is no version of this piece that escapes that fact.
What I could not put on my CV when I was twenty-three, in the small office of the regional newspaper where I had been hired the previous month, was that the editor who hired me had told me, at the end of the interview, that the paper's official line on the strike was the line the proprietor expected and that I was not to depart from it without first speaking to him. He had said this kindly, in the manner of someone passing on a slightly tedious house rule, and I had nodded, also kindly, and had taken the job. I have written, in the years since, several pieces of a kind that this essay is supposed to be, in which a young person comes to recognise that the institution they had wanted to join has terms attached, and the recognition is treated as a small awakening. I do not entirely trust those pieces. I am writing this one with that distrust in mind.
The strike I was sent to cover that summer involved about two hundred workers at a tannery on the eastern edge of the town, who had stopped work over a series of changes to their shift patterns that, taken together, would have reduced their effective hourly pay by something between six and eight per cent. The proprietor of the paper, who also sat on the board of the chamber of commerce, took the view that the tannery was an important regional employer and that the strike was, at heart, a misunderstanding. The editor, who had begun his career on the trade-union beat in another paper twenty years earlier, took a different view privately and did not, that summer, depart from the proprietor's view publicly. I went and interviewed strikers, foremen, the company's communications officer, and a local councillor. I wrote what I had been told to write, with the small concessions to balance that the form permits, and I filed it on time.
It is here, in essays of this type, that the writer is supposed to record the moment of moral reckoning. There was no such moment. What there was, instead, was a slow accumulation of small accommodations over the following two years, each of which seemed reasonable at the time, and the cumulative effect of which was that I learned the trade. I left for a different paper eventually, and have since worked on stories I am, on balance, proud of. The young man who took the job and nodded kindly is not a person I have repudiated. He is a person I am still, in slightly altered form, working with.
The convention of this kind of essay would now produce a redemptive paragraph in which I name what I would do differently. I have one prepared. I am not going to use it. The redemptive paragraph would do its work, and the reader and I would feel briefly that the essay had earned its weight, and the strikers from that summer — most of whom accepted, in the end, a settlement that gave them perhaps two of the eight per cent back, and several of whom had left the tannery within a year — would still be where they are. There is no version of this essay that reaches them. There may be a version of it that, by being honest about not reaching them, refuses one small comfort I am otherwise free to take.
A serious objection presents itself: that what I have just described — the principled refusal to write the redemptive paragraph — is itself a sophisticated form of moral self-presentation, in which the writer claims credit for restraint while continuing to do, in subtly altered form, the work the essay critiques. I think the objection is correct. I think there is no version of this essay that escapes it. The most that can be said is that admitting to it is preferable to not admitting to it, and that the slight worsening of the writer's position relative to the reader, which the admission produces, is a price worth paying.
What I could not put on my CV at twenty-three, then, was not the secret content of the editor's instruction. That instruction was, in a slightly less direct form, the standard one in regional papers of that era; everyone in the trade knew the shape of it. What I could not put on my CV was the information that I had nodded. Twenty years on, in a different city, in a paper that is run differently and in a register the proprietor of my first paper would not have understood, I am still looking for a way to write something in which the nodding, rather than the leaving, is the centre of the story. This essay is not it. I am noting that it is not it, and I am ending here, without an image, because the image I have available — of an empty editor's office on a Saturday morning in August, with a single light on and a kettle just boiled — would do more than its share of the essay's work, and I would prefer, on this occasion, to do that work myself, which I have not entirely managed.
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