Organising an event requires a lot of planning.
Potential mishaps should be as carefully considered as time, place and guests.
This past weekend for instance was The Taste of London in Regents Park.
It is a three-day event that gives city residents and tourists the opportunity to taste the culinary masterpieces of top restaurants and food retailers around the city.
And it gives restaurants and food retailers the opportunity to market themselves.
This scale of an event must have taken months to plan.
In fact, as it's an annual thing I can only imagine that there is a committee that works on it all year long.
It's always in Regent's Park so the location is set, however, they still need permits, marquees and signage for the event to properly run.
There was quite a lot of advertising both online and offline in the month leading up to the event, including write-ups in local newspapers and magazines, bus posters, and online banner ads.
Restaurants and vendors must be carefully selected, booth reservations made, payments taken, and tickets sold.
It was obvious that the event planners carefully considered layout, as sections seemed to be divided by food vendor, cuisine by country or region, and chocolate shops and alcohol stands dispersed randomly between it all.
A footpath was built around the entire space and marquees were set up over every vendor.
Bar areas were sporadically located around the premises where people could stand while eating the delicious food they had just picked up.
There were two things that I also remarked.
Firstly, Regents Park tube station was closed.
Proper planning would have resulted in the organisers knowing this ahead of time, and should have made them put up signs guiding visitors to the appropriate portion of the massive park from both the tube stations on either side of Regent's Park.
This could have probably been dealt with better.
Nevertheless, we found the festival and it was wonderful.
Of course the weather was very unpredictable.
It was raining on and off the whole day and had done so all week.
The grounds were muddy but of course there is little that can be done about that.
The fact that all of the booths were covered with marquees and the eating areas were also covered meant that people weren't leaving the event just because of a few showers- the show did in fact go on.
Similarly I have attended many weddings when it has rained.
However you would have never thought of them as rainy weddings, because the hosts were prepared and ensured that there was coverage every step of the way.
Whether there's too much rain or too much shine, canopies, marquees, pow wows, are always good features to have.