The Group Chat Started In July

"Nobody remembers who created it. Everyone's still in it."

Someone created the group chat in July. No one can really say who it was. It just was, one day, forty-something people deep, half of whom you haven't spoken to since last August. The name changes every year . This year it’s just “CARNIVAL.” No one doubts it.

By the second week in August it is unmanageable. Easy, three hundred messages a day. Who's coming and when. Whose flat is free Friday nite. Someone asking if anyone has a spare inflator for the bouncy castle that no one remembers agreeing to Someone else, always, asking the exact same logistics question that was answered 40 messages ago because nobody's actually reading anymore, they're just watching the number go up.

This is the part that never gets into the way Carnival is spoken of. Not the road, not the sound systems — the weeks of chaos that get it to there. The auntie in the bunch who is somehow coordinating six people’s flights without having to ask. The cousin who volunteers to “sort the food” and means business. By Sunday there’s a spread that took two days to make and gets eaten in twenty minutes. This is on the house. Nobody's been thanked properly either, really, not in a way that matches what it took.

Eventually you will mute the chat. Everyone does. Then you unmute it Thursday nite because you know it’s about to get real — the “who’s actually still coming” message, the “where’s everyone meeting” message, the inevitable “phone’s about to die, if you lose me I’m by the church on Colville, same as always” message that somehow works every single year despite making no logistical sense whatsoever.

Phone signal gone by Sunday midday, guaranteed... Two million people trying to use the same three towers. So you go back to the old way. The flag you can see from two streets away that someone is carrying. That milestone everyone agreed to three days ago in a chat no one was really reading. The whistle that your cousin's had since you were both kids, that cuts through a crowd better than any message ever could.

“Organising a weekend like this isn’t glamorous. It's forty missed calls and someone's mum asking why no one told her the plan had changed. But it works. Every year, in the same slightly chaotic way. Because enough people care enough to make it work even when nobody's officially in charge of anything.

By Tuesday the group chat is quiet again. It will sit there, unread, until next July when somebody—nobody remembers who—starts it all up again.

If you are the person who ends up organising every year, you know exactly who you are.