The Tendring Show has been and gone for another year. Not quite gone in my case, since I still need to count up the money, bank it safely, and draw up some kind of accounts. The accounts are only ever fairly imprecise, since we expense things at once that may last for several years, like the wooden colouring in bees for the children. We've got about eighty of those brought forward from last year, so this year they theoretically cost us nothing. Meanwhile I am rather tired, but I suppose that I was at the showground for nearly eleven hours, and only sat down for an hour of that.
The show was comfortingly much the same as it always is. There were cattle, goats, and sheep, and I even found a few pigs this year tucked away on the stand of a farm shop from somewhere near Beaumont-cum-Moze. There was a poultry show, and fox hounds, blood hounds, beagles and terriers. Heavy horses paraded. There were two different owl and hawk stands, and a rescued pipistrelle bat sat quietly in his keeper's hand. Great numbers of visitors' dogs ambled about happily. The beekeepers contributed three boxes of live bees to animal quotient. There's a thought: one of the boxes was new this year, while the other had new safety glass, so if I attribute the costs to this year's show then we will appear to have run at a thumping loss. Right, there's my Treasurer's report for the AGM largely sorted out, since the Chairman doesn't like me to say very much.
You can tell that I like the animals the best. The vintage cars were pretty good too, and there was a big turnout this year, and an innovation I approved of, which was to scrap the rope around their zone of the showground so that visitors could walk up to them and round them, instead of having to view them all nose on behind a barrier. And the model boats, which had rather incongruously got themselves some space in the Essex Wildlife Trust stand but I suppose they needed to be near the pond, were pretty good too. In fact, they were generally to an astonishingly high modelling standard.
The Polish pottery importer was there, who is always there, and, last of the big spenders, I bought a tiny, tiny jug for £5.50, for displaying very small posies of flowers on the breakfast table. The organic lavender hand cream supplier was there, who I now know to look for in the poultry tent, where they get free space by dint of taking along some geese. They have to stay with the geese, you see, and the geese have to be by the poultry tent. The poultry show numbers were down this year, so the organisers were probably quite pleased in the circumstances to have something extra to help fill the tent up. A young ceramicist whose work I liked last year but didn't buy any wasn't there this time, which serves me right for not supporting her when I had the chance. At the margin I should say that year by year there are fewer local craftspeople and more national brands, which is a pity but the way the world seems to be going.
I'll know tomorrow, but I don't think we sold as much honey as we did last year. We certainly didn't get as many customers for bee colouring, and had a few cakes left over at the end, though one of those was a chocolate tray bake with extremely squidgy icing. Customers tend to be nervous of icing at shows: it works better when you can sit down to eat your cake, and have a plate and maybe a fork. Still, our stand looked nice and very professional. We've even had some Colchester Beekeepers business cards printed to give to would-be beekeepers. It took a long time to get the committee to agree on what picture it wanted on the cards.
No comments:
Post a Comment