Morning has broken...

First thing on Friday morning, I went into the Town Hall tunnels. My mum had come along to help, and as we opened the door my heart leapt into my mouth. Would the nets have frayed and fallen? Had the few that had dropped been an omen and they'd all be lying on the floor? I took a step inside, and saw that around 100 had fallen off their strings, but nowhere near as bad as I'd imagined it to be. Quickly we scooped up the fallen ones, and sorted a plan.

As the majority of the nets were already up, it was a case of filling in the blank spaces. I'd worked out the night before that if I did strips of netting with cranes hanging off it, we could then hang these like tinsel along the side of the tunnels and in the gaps between nets. We got to work, and my mum figured out a quick way of tying the fallen cranes (which had no thread) to the ones with thread, thus quickening the process and meaning we were saving on thread. Unfortunately as we went to put one 'tinsel' up the ladder it was tied to fell over, and we ended up with a clump, but that was the only problem.

Until the pigeon. When I'd gone to get a couple of chairs from the cells, I'd noticed a pigeon lurking (I actually thought it was the ghost for a moment). We'd left it alone, and it had stayed out of our way, but then unfortunately two town hall people came down and one freaked out, which understandably freaked out the pigeon, which then started flying up and down the corridor. I chased it out of the way of the netting, as much concerned that it would get caught and hurt itself as to the damage it could do, and grabbed a warden. Who then decided the best course of action was to shoo it BACK down the corridor full of netting and string. The poor pigeon was frantic, I had visions of everything coming tumbling down, and the town hall people weren't really helping. In the end we managed to get it back into the cells, covered the end of the tunnel with material to stop it getting back in, and it finally left through the now-open door.

This seemed a good time to break for lunch, when I saw the only part of Light Night I would see this year, the giant heron in the Tiled Hall. Which was cool. Then it was back to work, and shortly after my friend Rachel, who has done a great blog post about Light Night, and her husband Andy arrived. We showed them what to do, then left them to it while we went and tackled the courtroom (you'd forgotten about that hadn't you?)

The courtroom was fairly straightforward. Material for a river, worksheets to make boats on the table, and cherry blossoms EVERYWHERE. The foldageddoners had come through strong, and I had a massive bin bag full. Big shout out to Rob, Lisa, Dave, Sue, Elly, Liz, Fran and everyone else who I might've missed out who made blossoms for me.

Back down in the tunnels, and we had about fifty cranes left. I'd kept saying we could just perch them on the heating pipes as if they'd roosted, but we were so close to having all one thousand 'flying' that we pressed on. At five minutes to five a steward came down to ask if we were ready to open in five minutes, just as I tied the last cable tie to hang the final string. We were there. One thousand cranes were flying through the Town Hall tunnels.

Piece of cake, huh?