Spring Fair 2013

I have been absent from the blog for a long while - there's simply been too much going on over the last month to leave energy for any writing not driven strictly by necessity. The hump is now past, though, so I can do a bit of updating on things that have happened over the last couple of weeks.

The Spring Fair took place again this year, as previous years, though not after a lot of struggle to reorganise the administration. Last year, you may remember, it rained almost constantly on top of weeks of rain beforehand, so the field was a boggy mess. This year, I assured myself and anyone who would listen, we were already scoring an advance before we’d even started.

The forecast was for ‘light showers’ in the morning followed by intermittent sun in the afternoon. We’d certainly had the ‘light showers’ by the time came to declare the event open, so I looked forward to better things and told everyone so over the PA system. No sooner had I handed back the microphone than the heavens opened and for half an hour we experienced probably the heaviest deluge I can remember since moving to Surrey. Then one of the tea urns failed. Then the barbecue flooded. Then we discovered that the band didn’t have any chairs. I sat in the ‘command caravan’ looking at the rain and reflecting that God might be trying to send a signal. The sky was a uniform dark grey and there was no sign of it so much as shifting.

Eventually the torrents ceased and the niggles were resolved. This was the cue for the CD player to malfunction. Well, we had another at church, I said, and cycled off to get it, wedging it into the basket before heading back to the field. Above there was a stark celestial contrast between a lowering grey mass of cloud to the south – over the fair site – and blue sky with white cloud to the north. The Spring Fair lay right under the frontier between the two. As I cycled, down came the rain again, so heavy and wind-driven that at one point I could barely breathe.

Yet, by the time the infant school children came bounding into the arena to do country dancing there was a bit of watery sun and we were fairly busy by the end of the afternoon. It was, all in all, a near-triumph just saved from being a near-catastrophe. As I went around the field later on gradually drying out (visiting one stall I reached out to something and water poured off my sleeve) ordinary members of the public said to me more than once how they look forward to the Fair, how it marks the start of Spring, how they spend so much time there talking to friends and how nice it is that it brings people together. So I suppose we do have to do it again next year. But not in the same way.

I said that last year.