Sometimes fate smiles on an enterprise, and sometimes it doesn't. So it was that the wildlife fair at the Beth Chatto Gardens was scheduled for yesterday and today, and it rained and blew both days. I'd agreed to help today, and as the weather forecast remained obdurately set for heavy rain for the entire day, I wasn't particularly looking forward to it. Still, I'd said I'd go, and looking on the bright side our gazebo is quite waterproof, and I'd just bought a new raincoat.
Doing the second day meant that I missed out on helping to put the gazebo up, which by all accounts was a performance as the organisers had given us a space so narrow that once our tent was up nobody could have got past except by wading in the lake. The team of volunteers had to walk the frame around the side of the pond until they got to a patch of grass wide enough to allow visitors to get by, and even then the garden maintenance staff produced a set of iron railings to go along the water's edge to try and stop people from falling in. The duckweed was much the same shade of green as the grass, and it would have been very easy to take a step off the edge if you weren't concentrating on where you were putting your foot.
In the end it rained slightly less than forecast, which is one advantage of a forecast for heavy and constant rain. Any brief break in the downpour or glimmer of sunlight come as a bonus. The small children who had been brought along actually seemed perfectly happy running around in their wellingtons and pond dipping in the rain, while the grownups were generally phlegmatic. You can't really afford to live in the UK and then go into a hissy fit each time it rains, even in the driest area of England. But visitor numbers were well down on what they probably would have been given better weather.
The number of stalls was down as well. A couple of organisations had pulled out at the last minute when they saw the forecast, which I thought was wimpy of them, but perhaps they didn't have waterproof tents. Ours was the subject of gazebo envy from a neighbouring stand, who'd got the same make but were grumbling that their's leaked, and our canvas looked better. The RSPB came, and the Essex Wildlife Trust, and a local nature reserve, and a group that rescue and treat injured owls. But Colchester Natural History Society didn't attend this year so I missed out on my annual opportunity to remind myself what a stag beetle grub looks like, and the Woodland Trust weren't there, despite owning a woodland just up the road. There was a big local fundraising push a few years back to buy the site, and it would have been graceful to come and update people. And the butterfly conservation people weren't there this year. I tried to interest the bumble bee man who comes with the beekeepers to the Tendring Show, but he must have had enough shows to attend already.
That is the trouble with country fairs and shows. Charities like the RSPB that are big enough to have a marketing budget have to decide how they're going to spend it, while small groups like the beekeepers are limited by the number of volunteers and the time people are able to put in. Every year we get requests from the organisers of village shows, and commercially run fairs with an angle on the environment, or food, or sustainable living, asking if we can run a stall, and there aren't enough spare hours in the year to go to most of them.
We actually had quite a nice time on our stand. Some people hang out in pubs and clubs, others at classic car meetings, and others sing Jerusalem with the WI before settling down to a lecture on My Life at Sea as a Cunard Steward. Beekeepers stand in a gazebo in the rain, gossiping among themselves, and explaining swarming and what bees do in the winter to random strangers.
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