Locals and visitors have shown over the past three years that they are happy to brave a Central Tablelands winter’s evening if food, drink and entertainment is laid on for them in Kings Parade and Machattie Park.

What they aren’t willing to put up with – or put up with in the same numbers – is rain, which fell on and off last Saturday and put a bit of a dampener on the party.

Council must really have been wondering about its luck: in the middle of an extended dry spell in this region, the rain last Saturday afternoon and early evening was never heavy enough to make a real difference to those wanting to fill water tanks or dams, but was persistent enough to change the minds of some of those who were planning to head downtown.

Having said that, the Ignite The Night event last Saturday wasn’t a failure – far from it.

If it had been the first year of the festival, the crowd that turned up last Saturday would have been considered a triumph.

(There was definitely a slow start, but then the festival-goers started arriving in numbers once the rain eased and eventually blew away.)

But the crowds over the past couple of years have been getting bigger, as have the expectations for the event, so there was no way last Saturday night’s showing in the CBD was going to be able to compare.

So council deserves better weather for this Saturday’s night Brew and Bite, but will it get it?

The good news is that the skies are forecast to be dry on the weekend.

The bad news is that Saturday night is set to be freezing – and that’s even by Bathurst standards. Freezing enough to lead into a -5 degree morning on Sunday, in fact.

So should we stay inside by the heater? Certainly not.

The party has been organised and it’s up to the city’s residents to attend on Saturday – whether the weather is frosty or not.

No-one can be blamed for being turned off by the rain last Saturday, but the cold is a different matter. We’re Bathurstians, after all. We eat cold for breakfast.

Here’s hoping locals turn out in numbers for Brew and Bite. At the very least, the more of us there are in Kings Parade, the warmer we’ll all be.