Each year Swanvale Halt church spearheads the Spring Fair, a vast effort that has grown over the years to include about fifty stalls run both by the church and local voluntary groups and businesses, funfair rides, country dancing by the schoolchildren, vintage vehicles and so on. There is a very peculiar Punch-and-Judy man who implies in conversation that he has something to do with the intelligence services but somehow I doubt this.
After weeks and weeks of rain it was touch-and-go this year whether the event would happen at all but the Council finally gave us the go-ahead to use the field we usually do. The forecast was not good, but at least dry. It began raining at 8.30 on Saturday morning and poured and poured until about 11. I turned up at 11.30 by which time the entrance to the field was so appallingly mangled that somebody had run to the DIY shop to buy a bag of woodchippings which were then sprinkled into the mud.
Eventually people began to arrive and thankfully we did actually break even. By the end of the afternoon there were even hints of blue in the sky. I got slightly irked by people claiming that it never used to rain on Spring Fair day when my predecessor was Rector. I have however seen film of the fair being set up in 1989 when there's a puddle on the field so big ducks are swimming about in it. We do need a bit of a rethink, though, and I think more games and things to do are in order. I am not, however, entirely convinced by the suggestion of one friend that we should race pigs. The static and malodorous and vaguely resentful donkeys who always attend are perhaps all the animals we need ...
Piglet racing is great fun, as anyone who has been to Bockets farm in Leatherhead will tell you.
ReplyDelete