Everything has arrived and been unloaded into our yard, it's only now we realise just what a daunting task we have ahead; this is a 3000 piece jigsaw puzzle for which there's no picture to compare against and no-one alive who has built it before to give us any tips.

So there was only one thing to do, start putting things together that looked like they were supposed to fit and see what shapes we could produce. There are floorboards, but 3 different types; Pine flooring with strange shaped pieces, Ash floorboard that are clearly original (you can see the hand tool markings on the back of them and the gorgeous soft curves worn into their surface by decades of dancers footsteps) plus some absolutely gorgeous oak pieces clearly designed to be the centrepiece dancefloor, but there are different quantities of each board AND each wood type of flooring is a different size to the other wood types. There are floor beams and support beams, brackets and spacers, pin and sockets that have all been lovingly and merticulously created to make assembling the structure quick and simple.... if you know what you are doing but which provide no clue as to how this should be assembled if you don't know the plan.

  

 

There is also a problem, ok maybe it's more of a benefit in the long run but definitely a problem for us right now - this isn't a brand new, fresh out of the factory tent; this is a structure with decades of use, thousands of build cycles and with that comes wear & tear, breakages and in-the-field modifications. It took us nearly 2 days to realise that instead of looking for 10 identical looking parts we actually had to look for 10 parts with the same dimensions but which were different colours, built in different ways (smaller pieces with stilts welding on, larger pieces that have been cut down hastily to fit) to enable to tent to be put together in time to open for a dance despite something being broken or missing. This made an already complicated puzzle even more complicated to complete but on the other hand it has given us a very special glimpse into the minds of the people who assembled this structure week in, week out as we start to notice the pattern of the decisions they made in a hurry to ensure the tent could be built and open; choosing spare parts from what they had to hand and getting to recognise the distinct styles of the different crewmen who worked with this structure over the years. There was one whose answer to almost any problem was to create new pieces by bending pieces of 1mm thick metal to create supports and scaffolding around broken areas, another crewman who was clearly adept at bending round tube into different shapes so created all of his fixes with random sized bits of round tube clearly sourced from local suppliers every time. There's even one who clearly relished being able to weld (clearly using cutting edge 1940's gas welding technology) whose answer to any problem was to weld together small random sized pieces of metal to create a larger object which visually looked completely different to the part it was supposed to replace but which had all the right supports and connectors in the places they needed to be. After 4 days we were finally starting to think like those crewmen from decades ago and began to make progress as one by one the different shapes we had created came together to form something that looked a bit like a dancefloor surrounded by a raised terrace. For the first time in decades the tent was slowing coming back to life...