Farmer Focus Livestock: Royal Cornwall Show goes well for Andrew Freemantle

We have traded at the Royal Cornwall Show for four years now and this year the start of the event was a marathon for me and my colleagues. Here’s my diary of the first day.

2am: Alarm goes off (I am sleeping in a tent outside the catering trailer). Start three pigs cooking, two for Kenniford and one for an AMC corporate event. By 3am it’s back to sleep, 4am check pigs are cooking OK. At 5am bread rolls arrive and I unload more than 1000. Then back to bed. It’s lucky I had a push bike to whizz around the showground on.

6.15am: Start cooking sausages, bacon and eggs and by 7.15am we have our first customer who always gets his free (if you read Jeffery Archer’s Kane and Abel you will know why).

9am: Start cooking the first pig for a Mole Valley Farmers evening event and by 11am we start carving pigs for sale as hog roast baps. By 1pm we have a nice queue at our stand and by 2pm AMC has been catered for and we are on the washing-up. At this point we also start cooking the third pig for Mole Valley Farmers.

5pm: Start cutting Mole Valley rolls, 6pm close down the trading stand and move kit to the Mole Valley marquee where we start serving with the help of their staff. Quickly a queue forms, snaking around the tent. Estimated time waiting for a bap one hour, but the atmosphere is great. We had to get more baps as we served more than 900 rolls from three pigs.

10pm: We have started the washing-up and begin getting pigs ready for the second day. Finally it’s back to the tent for 11.30pm with alarm set for 2am. I lie in bed and thank the man upstairs for everything going like clockwork.