The Grey Rider

In Stamford we have the Mid Lent Fair each year, and at night the town is ablaze with colour. When I’ve had a ride or two on the Jumping Frog with Devon, I predictably chicken out for a while and take a few pictures:

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 27mm, 3 sec at f22, ISO 800, on a tripod, no flash. It’s great fun shooting long-exposure light trails at any time, it is pure 100% experimental photography.

The whole week is a riot for the senses, England’s finest stone town is, quite simply, brutalised for six days, and the gentle townsfolk of Stamford come flocking: 

 

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 32mm, 1 sec at f22, ISO 800, on a tripod, no flash.

And into the cacophany, each year, strides the warrior, the One, the Legend. The fairground travellers whisper of the one they call The Grey Rider, a dreadful wraith some say, who rides the fairground’s oldest rides each year, never paying, seldom glimpsed save for in the blink of an eyelash, a ghostly apparition who, so the travellers tell, haunts the Mid Lent Fair with dark promises of retribution for some long-forgotten slight, perhaps a ride cut short due to electrical failure, or a token un-redeemed, or a burger half-cooked. Nobody knows. Aye, or a grim fairy, others say, who dwells in the marshes beyond the Meadows, called ‘Remarker’ by some, ‘She Who Says Things About People That Should Remain Un-Said’ by others. She pounces without warning. With a comment here, a look there, she tells people what they don’t want to hear, and then she is gone, into the night of the Mid Lent Fair, to the Rides…

Harsh tales, the dark secret of Stamford is rarely referred to directly, but in 2008 I caught her on camera, appearing in an unguarded moment with her horse-man Mark, driving his steed on towards The Grey Rider’s next appalling appointment with doom…

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 90mm, 1/50 sec at f5.3, ISO 1250, hand held no flash.

Behind the scenes, when the Crazy Shake lorry opens up its smoke cannons and floodlights the darkening March sky, there is spectacle, and drama, that is the essence of photo blogs:

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 22m, 1 sec at f6.3, ISO 800, on a tripod, no flash.

And somewhere in the darkness of the spaces in between the fairground attractions, The Grey Rider creeps un-noticed back to her Lair in the marshes beyond the Meadows, to hibernate till the Mid Lent Fair arrives, once again, next year…