"In the beginning it was an accident. I went to a meeting and the person who I thought was going to do all this dropped out and I suddenly found myself volunteering. So it’s been a bit of an adventure, doing things that I wasn't expecting to. I wanted it to happen, but I didn't expect to have a major role in making it happen.

Although I knew a little bit about event management before I started, I now know an awful lot more! One of the things I’m now looking into is ways of marketing the Beast as an ongoing way to raise money to fund the Bodmin Day in future, for which I need to know about the legal side of that kind of thing.

And just getting lots of groups of people to work together. I’d done a bit of that before, but not on this kind of scale, keeping people on track. It has stretched me a lot, but in really good ways.

And it’s not just me, it has worked like that for several other people as well, especially the ones on the sub-committee. One of my colleagues did all the publicity and was negotiating with papers, finding out that if you wait till the last minute you can get good deals on adverts when they’re trying to fill up the space.

With a few exceptions, the people who were involved in performing didn’t have any background in doing that sort of thing and they were absolutely terrified, but they all came away proud to have done something they’d never done before, and looking to next year, thinking about how they could do it better.

It’s been fun - not all the time, there have been moments when it’s been a bit tricky. But when it came to the play itself and the central square in Bodmin was absolutely crammed full of people and it was all happening, it was a tremendous sense of satisfaction to be involved in something that’s gone so well."