There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles over us in the week before tickets go on sale. It’s the quiet of people being very calm … yeah that’s not happening. 

Ticket launch week is tense, but it’s a good tension. The kind that comes from caring a great deal about getting one morning exactly right. Weeks of focused work funnel into a single click, and we’d quite like that click to work. 

Our Citizens were first cab off the rank, as they always are. The days beforehand were spent hunting for technical gremlins; those small, mischievous creatures who live in your systems (and heads) rent-free, contribute very little to society, and appear precisely when you’ve told everyone that gremlins don’t exist. 

Skye spent the week making sure the servers would scale up to meet the rush and that those all-important ‘clicks’ did what they are supposed to. We don’t fully understand what she did, and we’ve learned not to ask. When that glorious peak hit, the servers handled it with the unbothered ease of someone who’d quietly prepared while the rest of us clenched anything still able to be clenched. A small, invisible triumph, and entirely Skye’s. 

Josh found Sam curled up in the corner an hour before ticket launch, folded behind her laptop like a comma, quadruple-checking every ticket option. She had reached the stage of thoroughness where checking becomes a personality. Those ticket options were correct. We are confident they were correct in several parallel universes.  

Josh, for his part, read the 9 am citizens email more times than is strictly dignified. He knew the send time was right. He knew the time zone was right. He looked anyway on the theory that a typo, like a goanna hunting for a cooked snag, will move the moment you turn your back. 

Then 9 o’clock arrived. The email went out. And everything, quietly, almost suspiciously, went smoothly. Gremlins? What gremlins? 

It would be remiss of us not to mention there were a small number of citizens that didn’t have the experience we had planned. Unknowing membership lapses, unsubscribing from our citizens emails, hard bounces, or the very rare ‘we’re not sure why you didn’t get the email.’ We’re still learning, we’re trying our best, but… still learning. 

However, Woodfordia Citizens showed up, and they showed up in record-breaking numbers, which left us teary and quietly relieved at our desks. We are so thankful. Truly. 

And we cannot wait to deliver a Woodford Folk Festival 26/27 that will delight and astound you… assuming, of course, the gremlins behave.