The Tendring Show ground wasn't looking nearly so bad as I'd feared it would. The organisers were not allowing exhibitors to drive their own vehicles into the actual show area, instead laying on a shuttle service with four wheel drive farm buggies to help us take our exhibits from the car park to our tents, and towing vehicles that had to be in the show area behind tractors to stop them from getting stuck and then churning up the tracks. After the beekeepers' Show Secretary worrying that she didn't have enough people to help setting up there seemed to be rather a lot of us there. Many willing hands and feet trotted back and forth carrying bits of our stand from Roger's Landrover, and helped put up our own tent which we somehow wangle space for next to the marquee that the show organisers give us, then were idle for long periods in which most of us didn't seem to do anything in particular except gossip. Incidentally, this is remarkably what life inside a beehive looks like.
Order was gradually created out of chaos, with trestle tables, plastic tables, chairs, display boards, boxes of wasps nests and pieces of beekeeping equipment, entries for the photographic competition, posters, a honey extractor, the tiered staging for the honey show, tablecloths, boxes of honey for sale, candle making kits, and wooden bees for children to colour in all swirling around the tents as if caught in some slow moving ocean current, sometimes moving and sometimes coming to rest, until by degrees they all ended up in the right place.
The sun shone. It was such a relief to have a drying day, after my fears of yesterday. The main tracks through the ground were badly churned up, and a large load of bark chippings had been dumped at the junction of the show ground and car park to try and staunch the mud, but the bulk of the space though soft was intact, and the public car park looked as though it might stand up to visitors for one day. I thought I would risk driving up there tomorrow, rather than drag the Systems Administrator out of bed early to take me, and then have a mile walk at the end of the day to somewhere the SA could wait to pick me up, trying not to look as though I had the day's takings in my bag.
I helped carry things, and stuck some laminated photographs and beekeeping articles on to the notice boards, aware that the retired colonel who runs that part of the stand would probably want to rearrange them, and held a step ladder for someone fastening parts of our tent together. My main concern was that the honey, candles and cakes members were bringing for sale should be correctly recorded at the beginning, so that I would know how much money to pay them at the end, but there seemed to be a pretty good system in place for that, with a proper typed form to write down exactly who had brought what. I handed over the cash box with holes drilled in the base so that it could be securely screwed down somewhere out of sight, and began to feel that I wasn't contributing much by hanging about, so went home.
At home I checked my own bees, though it was sod's law that just as I got the top off the first hive the sun went in. It's much easier to see eggs and young brood in decent light. Still, my main concern in this miserable weather was to make sure they weren't going to starve if rain stopped them foraging for a few days. All had some honey stored away in their brood boxes, so they aren't in imminent danger of starvation. I'm scarcely going to get a crop this year, but chatting to my fellow members today nor are most people.
Enjoy the Tendring Show while you can. Our Show Secretary told me that there isn't a flower tent this year, because the person who organised it for the past couple of decades stepped down, and nobody else would take over. The basket maker, who used to make baskets in front of your eyes at the show, isn't taking a stand, because he can't compete with the stall in the shopping area selling baskets made in China for a quarter of his price. But there will be cattle, and sheep, and heavy horses, and goats, and chickens, and fancy rats. I know there'll be hawks and owls, because they're next to us. I hope we haven't taken too much of their space with our tent. There's an enormous NHS tent, though you need to be careful of those. A colleague's husband had his blood pressure and cholesterol tested at the Tendring Show a few years ago and discovered that both were too high, so has been on a low fat diet ever since. I'm sure the Colchester Morris Men will be there, since they are every year. There's a food hall, where you can buy frozen yogurt and rapeseed oil and pies. There'll almost certainly be working dog displays, and dog agility. There'll be show jumping. Bona fide agricultural suppliers will be there, whose stands are not very interesting unless you're a farmer and bona fide potential customer, in which case you can sit on their stand and they will give you a drink and you can talk about fertilisers and top dressing. There'll be stands selling checked shirts, and walking sticks, and septic tanks, and gravestones, and made to measure kitchens. You will be able to sign up for the U3A, and the RSPB, and goodness knows how many walking groups, cat protection societies, barge preservation trusts and other good causes, as well as of course the beekeepers.
Tomorrow evening we are going out to supper, an event originally scheduled for Sunday to oblige me so that it didn't clash with the Show, but rescheduled to Saturday because that suited everyone else much better including, crucially, the hosts. So don't depend on hearing how it was. It will probably be great, so long as I don't spend the evening stuck in mud in the car park.
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