That's the way to do it!
Yesterday found me pootling down to Covent Garden for the annual May Fayre and Puppet Festival, which has long been an annual tradition to visit, although I hadn't been for a few years. As a child it was a regular pilgrimage, although to be honest all the years pretty much blended into each other. Attending as an adult with the express intention of taking photos was an interesting proposition, as it made me pay a lot more attention to the individual puppet booths than I've done before. This was just as well, as I arrived too late to see any of the shows, catching the last half of the final performance only. It seemed a bit lacklustre, but I couldn't put my finger on why, until I was skimming through the wikipedia article on Punch & Judy and then I realised: the puppeteer was giving a non-swazzled performance and his weedy voice lacked enough authority to really do it justice.
It was really interesting comparing differences between the puppet booths, though. Some were a bit shabby and had obviously done the circuit time and again, others looked a bit more like they'd been made from a special kit, with the same style of (stencilled?) lettering popping up at least twice:
It was nice to see the efforts that some people had gone to with their booths, though, especially the background scenes, which varied quite a lot in each case. I think my favourite was the beautifully painted 18th-century skyline, although I had a fondness for the tatty Fuzzy-Felt appearance of the beach scene as well:
There was a surprising amount of detail to be found if one looked close enough, some of which you can see in the rest of the pictures here. I also ran across a gentleman I recognised from my childhood, because he was dressed in much the same outfit he wore then, although no longer doing puppet shows. He told me that he's now moved on to doing science-based shows, and that "the Large Hadron Collider is the best Punch & Judy act in the world." ("Because they keep missing", I think.) The strange thing was that he looked exactly the same age that he did when I first saw his puppet show at Rougham Fair when I was a very small tot. Wonder if that's the secret to staying young? Puppetry. Well, it's gotta be better than botox!