Much delayed thanks

Oxjam was last Friday, and today is Thursday and yet there has been no word of thanks on this thing.

No excuses really, just a heavy flu fell after Oxjam finished and so all thought of communicating in a vaguely coherent way was shelved until now.

And so to Friday just gone...

It was an amazing success, better really than we could have hoped. The instore with Scott FRabbit and Neil Meursault kicked the day off in spectacular fashion, the two of them are a great pairing. And I stood there throughout trying to look cool and not grinning like an idiot. Then the afternoon quickly deteriorated into a muddle of backline problems and missed sound checks, although, and this we quickly realised, no one else knew, so we smiled through it and everything came together in time. And from then on really it all passed by in an enjoyable blur. There was a real palpable sense of excitement in the air, the area between the Royal Mile and The Cowgate was buzzing. And maybe the highlight of the afternoon was when Avalanche popped over to tell us that tickets there had sold out, and we'd been told presale tickets just weren't doing well at the moment.

I thought that at some point during the night it would hit me that we'd done it, that we'd managed to pull something this crazy off and I'd feel some sense of ownership for it. But it didn't, I kept waiting for it but it didn't happen. I've puzzled over this for the past few days and now I realise that it's mainly because it wasn't just a handful of us that made this happen, but really everyone involved is to thank in some way. We worked really hard all summer but then in early October it suddenly felt like lots of people had our back, and we really needed it too, it wasn't just us, it felt like a community suddenly sprung up that lent us the support we needed. Bands, press, photographers, venue holders, so many people all pulled together in the final weeks and so the night seemed in some way to belong to the city, which I guess it should.

And so thank you to everyone that helped us make Oxjam Edinburgh possible, it's really been an honour to be involved in something that ended up being much bigger than we ever thought possible way back in July.