My birthday today - another year older. Receive some presents from mrs B and flowers from family. The latter consists of a sunflower, lilies, chrysanthemums, carnations. Go to see the Lewis Carnival at 2 o'clock. In Willowglen Road, several lorries are lined up. One has a group of Irish folklore figures, dancing to lively Irish music. Another lambasts the arrival of opiumbaron Matheson in the 1840s. Carloway Youth Club has an empty lorry, with just a sound system. Multistorey carparking is advocated by stacking cars on top of each other, and suggesting that carparking augments the price of a house by £100,000. A Galson Motors half-open topped bus carries Miss Lewis and Harris. The procession is billed to set off at 2 pm, but is 15 minutes late. The pipeband leads the way, then comes the procession. The rear is brought up by another pipeband. It goes down Macaulay Road to Bayhead and Cromwell Street. Children and adults run alongside, waving collection boxes in spectators' faces. At the bottom of Kenneth Street, everything comes to a temporary halt. Oh forgot about the fantastic dragon, carried by a number of youngsters. The pipeband was handed drinks during their break. I have never seen the town centre packed the way it was this afternoon. There were only 5 floats in the procession. Last year, a man died after he fell off a float and was crushed under the wheels of the lorry. Since then, stricter safety measures were imposed, like handrails on all floats. The Carloway float did not have that, so they had to run alongside it.
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