Show season – and a plumbing crisis
This time of year is show season in our area.
It kicked off with our traditional end-of-summer event – Glendale show at Wooler. Jake has a niche stewarding role there, spending the day entertaining the judges and sponsors in the Secretary’s tent. My job is to drive him home afterwards.
This year the organisers had arranged the weather to suit all the traders in turn. First it was bitingly cold, encouraging impulse purchases of loud tweed. I didn’t succumb. Tweed makes me look even more of a solid citizen than I actually am. However, if anyone had been selling emergency foil blankets, I would have been queuing up.
It was so cold that my fingers were turning blue so I asked a friend, who is a steward, if we could have a bonfire in the Members’ Enclosure. She suggested that a horsebox would be a good thing to burn.
I wasn’t sure whether she had a particular horsebox in mind or whether she just disapproved of the equestrian world in general. I thought it best not to probe further and just stuck my hands in my pockets.
Happily, things warmed up and it was then the turn of the ice-cream sellers to make some money.
It was a very sociable day and I encountered a number of readers of this column. One of them gave me an extensive confession of certain reprehensible behaviour on his part, followed by a plea that I should not write about it. We’ll see.
I also ran into my aunt, who gleefully informed me that so many people had said they had seen her picture in Farmers Weekly – but it wasn’t her it was me. Then she chuckled and confided her age. In fairness, she is remarkably well preserved.
Back in the Members’, Sarah, the steward in charge of the first-aid book, was having a very quiet day. She is a qualified first-aider but her role appeared to be to get to the scene of any mishap first, to fill in the accident book for insurance purposes. Apparently the proper first-aid teams won’t hand over details “due to data protection”.
She had radio contact with all the emergency services just in case. But despite maintaining a constant state of readiness, and perking up noticeably when the stunt motorcyclist came into the main ring, she was never required to spring into action. Good for the show, but a bit dull for Sarah.
The show season has a couple of weeks to go, ending up at Alwinton on 8 October.
The children are keen to go so Bramble can enter the terrier race. The prize money is good and doesn’t compare too unfavourably with low-grade horseracing. Especially when you consider that the training fees are nil and you don’t have to hire a jockey.
However, I’m not sure that Bramble is up it. Jake says she is fast and fit, but she lacks any sense of direction. She also seems to get easily distracted and is likely to veer off in pursuit of any passing insect. Maybe a set of blinkers would help.
We have not been to Alwinton show for a while because of clashes with children’s sports events. Jake used to enjoy it because there is a strong sheep show and an equally strong showing of local sheep breeders to talk to in the beer tent.
There also used to be a tradition for young men to climb the pole in the beer tent to see who could place a sticker the farthest along the roof. I look forward to finding out whether this still continues.
On the domestic front we have just had another plumbing crisis, which seems to be a regular event. Having put the children on the bus to school I was just having a cup of tea when the hot water cylinder developed a leak and started spraying its contents out all over the airing cupboard (including the electrics) and into the kitchen. This is the fourth one to go in the past 10 years, which seems rather a lot.
I took a logical approach to the problem, running out of the house yelling for Jake. Unfortunately, I had taken my glasses off in my haste so everything more than a few yards ahead was a complete blur. All I could do was try to follow the rather muffled sound of the quad.
Then Jake suddenly came down the hill and into focus. He rushed into the house, located and turned off the stopcock, switched off the mains electricity, then tackled the pool of water which was now covering the kitchen floor and moving towards the rest of the house. My hero – a cool head in a crisis and not bad with the mop either.
The verdict of the plumbing post-mortem was that the tank had eroded due to impurities in the water supply. What does this imply for the humans who live here I wonder? Clearly we are made of sterner stuff.